commissioner.org
| Source | Robert Naiman |
| Date | 08/03/21/08:25 |
| IF IT WERE true that an unemployment problem was ultimately solved by
a war, that suggests to me that the problem is political, not economic. We simply need to agree that mass unemployment is just as much of an emergency as a foreign menace. Wasn't the GI Bill motivated in part by a desire to soak up labor after the war? Don't the Venezuelans also have a program whose purpose is (to put it crudely) to soak up labor? There is always stuff that needs to be done that's not being done. We always need more therapists, more teachers, more people to help others, even if we don't need more cars and steel. I think there ought to be an explicit or implicit government guarantee of employment for every "able-bodied person" (which in this context, is almost everyone, since most people can do something - who can't answer a phone, or watch over something, or keep someone company?) who wants to work. The government can employ people directly, and also rent them out to businesses like a temp agency. Is that Keynesian, or Marxist? 1 in 100 Americans is now in prison. What if we had given those folks jobs instead? We're paying for their housing, food, clothing and medical care anyway. Wouldn't we be better off if they were doing something useful instead? |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho