There is plenty of work to be done. It's just not paid work. How do you propose to coerce people to pay for this work?
Now the "sit at home playing video games and get free money" choice has been removed. You'll still have a minimum standard of living, but you must contribute to the world rather than simply living a life of leisure. I.e. shared responsibility.
If you are actually saying you don't want your children taken care of by someone doing it for the money (or prefer a person selling the "artisinal child care" persona), that's fine. Many wealthy people in the west can afford to hold out for such things.
Others are less picky and just need a responsible adult to keep their children from eating poop or dying of thirst, and teaching them a little Marathi is just a bonus. Should those people be deprived since the service doesn't meet your standards? Note that public schools mainly just meet the latter standard - should we get rid of them also?
So, if child care is just another job (as it is now), what would your proposal mean? Basically, that the government pays for an army of child carers, and that that army would be funded by tax. Just like the public school system.
So basically yes, the government will pay for an army of child carers, an army of infrastructure fixers, an army of trash picker uppers, etc. It just won't pay very much and most of what it pays will be in-kind benefits rather than money (e.g. rooms in government dorms in low cost areas).
It's interesting that you are suggesting people who are currently on government benefits are disproportionately unsuitable for child care. Can you expand on this? My attempts to fill in the blanks here lead me to the idea that poor people are irresponsible and morally defective (e.g., they might ignore it when children start hitting each other with rocks), but I suspect that isn't a claim you'll endorse. Could you clarify in detail what you mean?
This did not seem to work for Soviet Union (and its reluctant allies), and market realities still exposed themselves - if you wanted to hire a government plumber, repairman, electrician, dentist, etc., you were welcome to sign up for a long waiting list or miss a few appointments here and there, because hey, what exactly is the accountability here? They won't fire you.
If you actually needed to get the job done, be prepared to offer a generous tip, which in absence of solid money would have to be something bartered (vodka, spare car parts and gold were among the unofficial currencies pervasive in USSR).
Once such economy evolves, even the people who were trying to put in a minimal effort at their government-sponsored job just stop, because they feel they're getting the shorter end of the stick than the guy accepting generous gifts. Moreover, people at the occupations that are not typically monetized in a market economy (librarians, for example) start thinking of good ways to establish some barriers to force consumers towards such generosity (by withholding high-demand books, not providing information in a timely manner, etc.) Now a portion of a population is on an active mission to create problems in society rather than solve them, as their additional monetization efforts depend on existence of such problems.
This second-order effect seems to penalize the poor (and un-connected) even harsher than before.
In the Soviet Union, there was no private sector. I'm proposing no restrictions on the private sector - in fact, one explicit goal of this system is to make government dependence less pleasant (you need to go out into the national park and build trails rather than sitting at home playing video games) so that more people enter the private sector.
AFAICT, this was strictly true (if at all) only between the first Five Year Plan and 1936; the private sector (that is, non-government directed business) was restricted in both what markets it could participate, and the forms of business (in most markets where private industry was allowed, the only business form allowed was the individual independent worker/owner, to use the language of capitalist economy) but it was not nonexistent.
No, that's not all you are proposing. You are proposing a particular mechanism that you claim is aimed at that goal (not merely proposing the goal itself), which has concrete features beyond just the goal you claim for it.
> Comparisons to the Soviet Union are nonsensical.
Perhaps, but you haven't provided a reason to believe that, just offered a factually-incorrect distinction between your proposal and the labor policy of the Soviet Union.
But it'll actually be pretty hard for the private sector to compete on any task requiring unskilled labor. The government gets labor at nearly zero marginal cost since it would be paying those people even if it didn't put them to work.
Again, literally the only thing I'm proposing is that instead of giving people money NOT to work, we instead give them money to work. I'm not proposing communism or slave labor.
No, you are actually proposing giving them money, whether or not there is work, and then trying to scrounge up some (perhaps meaningless) work so that the money you give them cannot be used for personal development, small entrepreneurship, etc.
> I'm not proposing communism or slave labor.
Forced, economically inefficient (hence, why there is no demand in the private market including that fulfilling government contracts) labor through economic coercion rather than chattel slavery, but I'm not sure that the difference is meaningful, especially if there really is a problem of a growing-over-time number of people unemployable at any given time in the private market due to changes which render their labor superfluous given the available alternatives.
We already give them money. I'm simply accepting that this is unlikely to change.
Forced, economically inefficient (hence, why there is no demand in the private market including that fulfilling government contracts)
The labor is not forced you are free to turn it down. We have no way of knowing whether the labor is economically inefficient, due to existing market distortions caused by paying people not to work.
In any case, unless you are claiming that there is no valuable government work to be done at all (are you?), it's a little silly to suggest that my plan to redirect idle labor into providing those government services is inefficient. The labor is either wasted or it's consumed.
The motivation for the overseers is clear. The worker bees have two choices - work hard (and get paid) versus do nothing (and get paid). Why would the workers go for the former versus the latter?
I mean, otherwise this whole mandatory-work-for-benefits thing doesn't make any sense (not to say that its a good idea even then.)
There are some short-term issues as far as performance and accountability for those hired into such monopolies, as well as aynrandian incumbency protection, such as rejecting light bulbs as too many are employed in the candle-making sector.
what about people who get illnesses that take them away from work for extended periods? people needed multiple surgeries, months of physical therapy, assistance of medical devices, etc.
is healthcare included in this government job? if so, what isnt covered? if not, how are people expected to stay healthy enough to continue working?
mental health care?
how are these people expected to save for retirement?
are people over the age of, say, 75 expected to work as construction workers if they didnt save enough for retirement?
How and when would these workers have the time and money to become trained for better paying careers? does this job come with some tuition programs also?
you mention trash pickers, why wouldnt that be automated, or is this a scheme by which we outlaw the automation of sectors of the economy in order to protect these government jobs?
would these workers/companies compete on the open marketplace with others, or would this be a government monopoly?
if its not a monopoly, say im hired as a child carer. what do i do when one day theres no child to take care of because people dont want the shitty government child caretakers, they want to private ones? do i get fired? do i get paid to sit in the government office and wait? can i go home? is this an economically efficient use of a persons time?
if im to sit and wait in an office until the end of the day, how is that different than a UBI other than i have to sit in an office all day?
You're suggesting that when 200 people apply for a single waitress job, all 200 should be hired? That's going to be a really crowded restaurant. The Fire Marshal might have a problem with that. How many people do you need to hand you your burger anyway?
Agricultural jobs are out. Less than 2% of the workforce now produces more than double the food the entire population needs, plus exports, cattle feed, pet food, biofuels, and agricultural products used in manufacturing, etc. Manufacturing is rapidly going the same direction. Soon less than 2% of the population will be able to manufacture way more stuff than we need. That leaves only the service sector. The service sector is a weird beast, ranging from the below-minimum-wage waiters/waitresses (for which there is no demand) up to professionals like psychiatrists (where we really do have a scarcity). But at the moment, at least, costs of higher education are skyrocketing. Sending those 200 unsuccessful waiters through 8-10 years of school to become psychiatrists would enable some few to excel, but what about the rest? And what about the cost?
Having 200 people serve you your burger is not a solution. Forcing 200 unsuccessful waiters through 8-10 years of higher education is not a solution. Forcing children, the elderly, and the disabled to work is not a solution. The main problem is a lack of demand for labor, and the only way to solve that is to artificially create a demand. But now you're just paying people to dig holes that don't need to be dug and then fill them back in. That's useless and degrading. Why are we even doing that? What is the law of nature proclaiming that anyone who doesn't spend most of their life making someone else richer should die of starvation?
We need to rethink the basics. We need to rethink what we expect of people and why. This is not a futuristic sci-fi singularity thing, this is something that is happening right here and now, and it's already affecting us.
(Note: I have no problem with people who sell drugs or sex and think both should be legal. I'm referring specifically to theft here.)
I'm not sure why we need to accept this increased crime tradeoff. Why can't we (here "we" refers to folks who are willing to work for money rather than steal) just wall ourselves off from them?
I'm just pointing out the main flaw in this plan and the reason it (as far as I know) has never been implemented. You can argue against a strawman all you like but it's not going to solve any problems.
It's certainly a fallacy to say that a plan is impossible because no one has done it before; everything has a first time. It's irrelevant in this case, however. FDR implemented it, it was called the Civilian Conservation Corp and it was awesome - we got a national park system out of the deal. India does it too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rural_Employment_Guar...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps
South Africa and Argentina have similar programs but I don't know as much about them.
Its an awesome solution to a particular kind of transitory unemployment (and, at the scale it had at its height, perfectly sensible when there is a large, national, temporary economic dislocation) where you expect that the kind of work that people were doing before will be in demand again.
Its less good as a way of dealing with long-term structural changes in the economy -- either in the proportion of people employable at living wages in the marketplace or the jobs demanded. Particularly the latter, since locking people into public make-work jobs with mostly or entirely in-kind, survival-necessity payment provides little opportunity for adjustment to labor market changes.