People who lost their jobs wait in line to file for unemployment following an outbreak of the coronavirus disease at an Arkansas workforce centre in Fayetteville, Arkansas, US on April 6 2020. File photo: REUTERS/NICK OXFORD
You already know how to work with pumps and pipes from your old job, and though CO₂ removal is a new industry, it’s scaling up fast. And you have a real right to work, as stated in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights — and, ever since passage of the Great Pandemic Recovery Act, as stated in federal law, too. A good job is a good job.
And because there is, in this possible future, also a federally mandated job guarantee, you and millions of others are finding your way to the new jobs popping up everywhere. The co-ordination and sometimes the pay are provided by government, while the specific job requests come from any local projects that need labour.
Some conventional economists have attacked what they see as MMT’s cavalier treatment of money, and critics sometimes call the discipline “magic money tree”. Inflation might result from such money creation — or deflation. Opinions differ, but all agree destabilisation would be disastrous. The theorists behind MMT want to replace our current certainty of millions without work with a much different certainty. Governments can create full employment by legislating a job guarantee, becoming the “employer of last resort,” hiring every person who comes to them asking for a job. That’s the case made by Bard College economics professor Pavlina Tcherneva and the trio of authors who wrote Macroeconomics, the textbook of the discipline.
The phrase “wage pressure” is yet another indication of how markets exert power to keep power. In this context, a Job Guarantee would erase wage pressure , and the less fearful and more productive populace that resulted might thrive in a feeling of security.Automation is a false problem here. Most jobs require a flexibility and creativity that only humans can bring to the task.