Government proclaims that all people are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, to freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from want and fear. But while proclaiming these individual rights, it does little to promote them beyond making laws that attempt to protect individuals from social infringement upon these rights.
While acknowledging these individual rights to life and to freedom from want and fear, government acts as if it is powerless to give more than token help in promoting them.
Government recognizes these rights but fails to acknowledge that they require money for their fulfillment. Individual rights require not only constitutional proclamation and/or legal support, but also money to sustain them, so government acknowledgment of rights is for the most part half-baked.
A person who is unemployed due to downsizing, disability or other reasons will not be free from want and fear. People who have lost their homes in the Great Recession will not be free from want and fear. Sick people who cannot afford medical care will not be free from want and fear. And the entitlements of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be slipping from their grasp.
This discussion could move in many directions vis-a-vis resolutions of these problems, but let us focus upon only one for now:
Joblessness
It is horrifying to find in reading the literature of economics that
unemployment came to be used as a policy tool. That is, unemployment was not a problem to be tackled by government policy, No, unemployment became the policy tool to deal with the supposed problem of inflation. So, policy actually was targeting unemployment, using that to keep inflation rates low. |
The quote is from
L. Randall Wray, Modern Monetary Theorist.
So government numerologists / economists, far from promoting the rights of citizens, were actually promoting the loss of rights for many unlucky citizens. These people were simply collateral damage in the war against the "supposed problem of inflation."
To eliminate unemployment, a federal Job Guarantee is proposed by Modern Monetary Theory thinkers, and explained most recently here by maddogg:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
So how will a Job Guarantee achieve both full employment and price stability? Well, first of all, it will, by definition, eliminate unemployment. Everyone who is ready, willing, and able to work will be able to get a job that is funded by the federal government. That pretty much wipes out unemployment as we currently define it. Of course, there will be some people who refuse the job offer because they'd rather spend time looking for higher paying work. There may be others who refuse to work at the set wage. That's fine. The program is meant to be completely voluntary. |
Participating in a voluntary Job Guarantee program at a minimum wage would have the advantage not only of providing income, but also of easing the way into a regular private-sector job by ensuring a continuous-work history and additional job experience.
How the government could advance such a program is explained at the link above. I recommend that diary highly. It also contains important links to other explanations and to the other concepts of Modern Monetary Theory, the up-and-coming viewpoint on economics that lays low the specters of austerity, debt limits and other frightening creatures of the night called up by conservative / corporatist economic "thinkers".
Please follow our group,
Money and Public Purpose (here), as we continue to pursue a strong effort to bring MMT to the attention of everyone who can possibly support it.
Thank you for reading and reccing.
psyched