Raúl Carrillo '15 is a J.D. student at Columbia Law School. He earned a B.A. in Social Studies at Harvard College, where he wrote a column on American politics for The Harvard Crimson. He subsequently worked as a staffer for California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris, assisting with the 2012 multi-state mortgage fraud settlement. In the summer of 2013, he interned at the Securities and Exchange Commission in New York City.
The federal government can easily afford a job guarantee program …Of course, because money that is printed always has value no matter what.
They don't have to now. People freely choose to go to these outlets - because they provide goods at excellent prices and/or at excellent speed.
If Government is given monopoly power over the means of production you get a totalitarian state. You get Nazi Germany. You get the USSR. You get Mao's China.
Carillo wants this because he is a budding fascist.
Sure it does. Grab a shovel, Raul.
*facepalm*
I’m thinking if we could pay people to actually work, it would be cheaper and more humane than the way our social safety is currently administered.
We have to ask ourselves if government dependency is a good thing and if not how to begin changing it.
Another entitlement program is not the answer.
A Job Guarantee is justice?
Scary, perverted language.
Raul also makes the idiotic argument that starts “In the richest country in the world....” Hey progressives, guess what? There are things even the richest country in the world cannot afford. Being richest is not the same as having infinite resources.
This idea of government as employer of last resort has gotten traction over the last year or so in mainstream media, as if it has never been tried before and is elegantly simple. Read a history books some time, will ya!
For some strange reason, the phrase “Arbeit Macht Frei” immediately comes to mind.
Actually, I do somewhat agree with the guy.
Anyone who gets welfare should be required to work for it. Pick up trash, clear out vacant lots, maintain parks, etc. Maybe if the welfare weren’t just handed out for doing nothing, they’d have a bit of incentive to make themselves eligible for real jobs and actually improve their lives for a change.
So, out of the hundreds of millions of people that have lived in the U.S. these are five that got it right, right?
“The US government can easily afford a Job guarantee (JG) program, becoming our employer of last resort.”
“Easily afford?” What a blithering idiot. The US Government is deeply in debt. It can no more afford some new utopian entitlement than a college student with four credit cards maxed out and 50K in loans can afford to take his buddies out for a gourmet meal with drinks.
I’m not an economist, but common sense tells me this.....
pencil pushing, paper shuffling, cleaning, building roads, etc. are all essential jobs, not these kind of jobs do not PRODUCE anything. A strong economy cannot be based on only service type jobs. There must also be production of goods to be sold for a profit. Our government (and the unions) now makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the producer businesses to make a profit. And it is producer industry that created good-wage-paying jobs for masses of blue collar workers in the past.
No one has a RIGHT for a job. They have to EARN the job.
The problem we have here in the United States is that the ever increasing “Jack booted thug” (the government) has made unemployment by “feeding the animals” and choking free enterprise to death by regulations, taxes and laws.
Get the government out of business and quit feeding the animals and everyone will be better off. Those with ambition and work ethic will thrive while the animals that once sat on their butts and got fed will be forced to “forage” for their food and shelter....and that means they have to get off their asses and actually WORK.
This guy’s got his head so far up his @$$ that he’s hallucinating from lack of oxygen.
Another college indoctrinated moron.
Yes, what we need here is another government directed, Soviet style “busy work” economy.
OMW! This clown is serious, and this isn’t the Onion!
Yet another Ivy League genius, lacking any comprehension about the simplest of economic concepts. He’ll soon be working for the Obama Administration.
Would a job guarantee just create dismal make-work? No. Even ultraconservative idol Bill Buckley admitted there’s always something to be accomplished. New Deal employees built dams, bridges, roads and parks. Similar efforts have succeeded in Sweden and South Africa. Congressman Conyers has proposed creating enough public works for full employment, targeting decaying, unsustainable infrastructure.A shovel is a useful garden tool. But when there is a big excavation job to do and a bulldozer to do it with, digging with a shovel instead of operating the bulldozer does not satisfy the motivation for having a job - which is to convey dignity. The dignity of a job flows from the dignity of the boss. And the dignity of the boss flows from his responsibility for the money he pays for the job. The responsibility of the boss for the money he pays flows from the fact that money is credit, in the sense that"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . . who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds . . .Ultimately the money the boss pays is and must be scarce; if the boss simply writes meaningless IOUs for the payment, the job is and can only be “just dismal make-work.”And that is the fundamental reason the government can’t create jobs by fiat. To impart dignity, a job must have an extrinsic purpose. The minute you start out from the premise of giving Joe a "job,” Joe is already being patronized - and your purpose is already defeated. Start from the need, find a way for Joe to fill it, and you have done something. Joe is a solution looking for a problem. If Joe is a problem and the solution is to put him to work, “just dismal make-work” follows as the night follows the day.
There is scant difficulty in finding things to do whose value is not zero.
The great problem is to find things to do which are seen to be actually worth doing.