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What Sounds Better To You - Guaranteed Basic Income Or Federal Job Guarantee?". That's the headline that Yves Smith posted over at Naked Capitalism last week and it's a reprint of an article by Howie Klein that was originally published over at
Down With Tyranny! and it's a take-off on a year old piece in
Jacobin magazine,
Why We Need a Federal Job Guarantee. And at the beginning you've got basically raw capitalism, an economic system where those with capital basically own the system. It's a neo-feudal system. It's a reinvention of a form of economics and politics that ruled Europe and Asia and South America for millennia.
And this is the modern version of it: at-will employment, the right to work for less states, the employer has all the power, the employee has no power. That's the starting point, and that's where we were when we started the Republic.
And then unions rose and workers demanded rights and citizens demanded regulations to protect themselves from being poisoned by big companies or being robbed by big companies, etc. And then we went from a raw capitalism to regulated capitalism, which seems like a good first step.
And now there's two steps beyond that. What do you do when capitalism itself starts to fail? At least in this context, the 'capitalism = jobs' formula.
Because what is happening increasingly in this era of monopoly or oligopoly - a small number of very large corporations owning everything from our media, to our food supply, to everything else - is that we're seeing this extraordinary concentration of power.
They're using that power to reduce our wages, reduce our benefits and make us all poorer so that the 1% can get richer. And that's exactly what's been going on ever since the Reagan presidency kicked off this process.
So what do you do about it? Well, there's a couple of solutions.
One that has come out of Europe is the Universal Basic Income (UBI): everybody gets a certain amount of money every year, say $10,000, whether they work or not, no matter what they do.
The problem with the UBI is that it is hard to understand and easy to attack. It doesn't make a good bumper sticker.
So what they're recommending is that instead of doing the UBI, we do what Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930s which worked spectacularly well. It got us out of the Great Depression.
