Steve_American wrote:Why have you refused to reply to my idea of the MMT-JGP?
I have. There are three main reasons the MMT-JGP is not a genuine solution:
1. Landowners will just charge workers that much more for permission to access the enhanced economic opportunity a guaranteed job represents.
2. AI will soon render jobs irrelevant. That proves jobs are not the problem, which proves jobs cannot be the solution.
3. A JG misunderstands what a job is. Creating the purchasing power to employ people by issuing fiat money does not automatically make their labor productive enough to justify their wages. I.e., people will move from more productive private sector jobs to less productive guaranteed jobs in the public sector, reducing total production.
It is MMTers plan to provide for "restoration of people's rights to liberty and property in the fruits of their labor [the job itself],
The JGP does neither.
combined with just compensation for any unavoidable removal of rights by privilege [the seemingly high wage offered]."
Wages are paid for labor, not compensation for abrogation of rights. People are owed just compensation for the removal of their rights to liberty whether they work or not.
This is a plan to not need a UBI, because the local govs. will find a socially useful job that every UE adult or teen can do.
They can't. The result will be busywork. We saw this in the USSR with its guaranteed jobs: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."
The Fed. or national Gov. pays their wages and also pays the local admin. people. So, the JGP brings cash into the local economy so that its businesses can sell more stuff, but the Fed. picks up the entire bill for it. For the local well off people it is a win-without loss thing.
Creating money is not the same thing as creating wealth.
The intent of this plan is to be sure that there is a job for everyone,
Which is the wrong goal, as proved above.
so there is no UE, and to add the correct amount of deficit spending into the national economy as the economy booms or slows.
That is the job of an independent Mint, not a JG.
This means there should be no high inflation as a result. It sets the wage at a "socially inclusive" level so that people can live on it and still contribute to the demand in the local area to help the business owners have more income too.
UBI also does that, and so would justice.
However, it is intended to just be temporary for most workers as the economy slows. They will go back into the private sector as soon as the economy improves and businesses want to hire them. The workers will not have been UE and so will not have lost the habits that good employees need for most jobs.
They will have a new habit: dependence on the JG.
You say that you think that any UBI must not be set up such that workers can "freeload" off it and just not work, ever.
No I don't. I am the one who says we have to shake hands with the fact that we are moving inexorably towards an economy in which
no one will work, ever.
You don't seem to grok that in the West, there are just not enough jobs for everyone.
No. I am the one who understands WHY there are not enough jobs for everyone.
MS econ. has created a sub-theory that shows how the "natural level" of full UE changes as the UE% changes.
Which is anti-scientific trash.
That is why MS Econ. can claim that Spain is at the 'proper' (i.e., full employment) UE level when youth UE is over 20%, and all UE there is about 15%. This sub-theory is total BS. The theory makes no sense logically, it seems to have been created so that capitalists or the Gov. don't need to create more jobs when UE is over say 3%, even when UE is over 20%. This because the sub-theory says that as UE increases so does this artificial "full employment level of UE".
No. It is because a scientifically plausible theory of unemployment would identify the fact that it is caused by privilege, especially landowner privilege, and such facts are not permitted.
. . . But, I ask again, why don't you grok that conditioning a UBI on having a job is not going to work when there are not enough jobs in the economy for everyone to have one?
I haven't suggested UBI be conditioned on having a job. I have explicitly stated that if it is to be understood as compensation for the removal of people's rights to liberty by privilege, it can't.
Also, what about the self employed, like I was for years. I had a job and regular customers, why am I not eligible for the UBI, or would I be, if ... ?
AFAIAC, UBI means every resident citizen gets it unconditionally, except maybe those living in institutions where others are responsible for them, in which case the institution would get it.
. . . In the EU there are many nations like Spain with high UE, and this has been so since at least 2008, if not from the very beginning. In the US and Aust. this was also true, if all those not looking for a non-existing job were included in the UE calculation.
The MMT-JGP solves this problem by having the Gov. have a program that hires *all* the UE workers.
Unemployment is a symptom, not the disease:
"Wherever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on.
— THOMAS JEFFERSON
This is my solution.
It is a band-aid solution because it does nothing to treat the actual disease.
I have not seen your solution to the problem that there are not enough jobs. What is your solution?
1. Remove the privileges that compel prospective workers to pay the privileged full market value just for
permission to work, and restore the equal individual liberty rights of all citizens to access economic opportunity without paying for permission.
2. Require the holders of exclusive land tenure to repay to the community the subsidy that government spending on desirable public services and infrastructure gives them. This will give junior governments the revenue they need to provide more of such services and infrastructure, up to the limit where such public expenditures pay for themselves in increased location subsidy repayments.
3. End the taxation of wages, production and exchange that make living costs unaffordable at the market wages of the least productive.