Robert Tracinski, in The Federalist [via Ace]:
Now a major portion of the left has stopped even pretending that they value work. Hence the growing support for a guaranteed minimum income, a lifetime handout large enough to provide everyone with a comfortable existence. The goal, according to one supporter of this idea, is precisely to allow people not to work… [But] the evidence suggests that when people are paid just for breathing, when they lose the basic habit of working, they don’t spend their time writing symphonies. They sit on the couch smoking pot and watching bad TV.
That’s if we’re lucky. …
not in the inner city … they become drug entrepreneurs … i.e. “small businesses” …
http://t.co/K2m9kU6I0y. If we are lucky.
Work that pays enough for self support. Taking steps to match our population (both today and in the future) to the number of jobs we can expect to have. Thinking about ways to spread hours around — right now we have job hours mismatch as many work more than 40 hours while too many are not working at all or are fewer hours than they’d like.
What leader in either party is serious, well informed and honest about these issues? None of the usual suspects, that’s for sure.
We have people who say they are conservative who talk about work as the solution to unemployment — as if there’s a job tree in every town and city in America that has an endless supply of good paying jobs for all who want them.
I see the potential problems with guaranteed income it’s kind of like Medicaid for everybody who can’t possibly afford private insurance. Not the solution we’d like but a solution nevertheless. John Boehners and Mitch McConnell have been saying “JOBS” for years and it hasn’t appeared to help. Now they don’t even both to do that much.
“Under a Sanders administration, a job will be guaranteed, but not mandatory.”
Well, obviously.
On the other hand, I actually support such a scheme.
Just not now – in the future, when robotic factories and labor make almost all non-service work something humans aren’t efficient at.
I see that as basically inevitable, and what better outcome for our automated future than to make it so that nobody needs to work because robots do it all for us?
(The unmotivated will remain so, of course, and just sit home watching TV and smoking dope. As they already do when not working at Taco Bell or whatnot. If they live off the work of robots rather than the labor of other humans, taken at gunpoint, who cares?
Those who want more from their lives, well, nobody’s stopping them from doing so, or stopping people who want more income from doing service jobs [which robots are comparatively bad at] in addition to the minimum.
A decently libertarian solution to a future problem.
[Unlike Joan, below, I think “matching our population to the number of jobs” is horribly dystopian and cannot be achieved by any means that aren’t worse than the thing they’re trying to cure.])