georgephillip
Diamond Member
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- #81
"A JG would offer a hand-up from the isolation and stagnation often accompanying joblessness. As economists Sandy Darity and Darrick Hamilton argue, it would also combat racist hiring discrimination, anti-immigrant sentiment and crime.Sounds outlandish, doesn't it?
"A right to a job may sound outlandish, but its common sense. You need dollars to eat, and unless you steal the dollars, you generally have to earn them.
"If the government wants to protect property with cops, courts, and prisons, issue a single, common currency, and tax and fine us in it, it should at least guarantee we can work for our own dollars.
"Politicians ramble about equality of opportunity and the dignity of work, but to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, we need boots.
"And lest our boots stomp each others necks in senseless competition for too few jobs, we need a job guarantee.
"A job guarantee isnt that radical.
"Thomas Paine proposed one in 1791.
"In 1944, FDR included the right to a living wage job in his Second Bill of Rights and his Republican opponent promised state-ensured employment.
"The Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrined the right to work and philosophers Rawls and Dewey advocated government provide enough work.
"LBJ deliberated a JG and Martin Luther King Jr., demanded one."
Your Government Owes You a Job | The Nation
Since US Capitalism prefers extracting wealth as opposed to producing wealth leading to a situation where median household income today, adjusted for inflation, is lower than it was in 1989, it becomes clear that US capitalism no longer delivers the goods for a majority of its citizens.
The democratic solution calls for government to provide what the private sector is no longer capable of providing.
There is a word for what yo just described, communism. Why do you think it is going to work better now than it did in the past?
Wait, I know, you finally figured out how to make magic money work, right?
the nation and NYslimes told him so...that's all he needs
"Some critics dont want dignified living to depend on wages, preferring an income guarantee. Im sympathetic, but people want checks and good jobs. Moreover, unemployment, like disenfranchisement, feeds the fat cats. Paying people to sit on the sidelines, without offering an option to participate, can finance apathy."
Your Government Owes You a Job | The Nation