I have an image in my head of all my neighbors working at the same company. WTF would we be doing?
I’m a software engineer, my wife a reporter, my next door neighbor a nurse, the guy across the hall plays video games all day. His girlfriend is a cleaning lady.
This doesn’t include the sex offender down the street, the guys who shoot guns in the middle of the night, the drug addicted and mentally ill who hang out near the bus station, or any other “hard cases.”
A vast quantity of paid labor is great for infrastructure projects. This is what pulled the US out of the depression, and is the reason we have so many gorgeous post offices and public buildings everywhere. (Particularly on the post office front, this included stone workers, but also artists and architects and engineers.)
(Expanding on edit...) And really, infrastructure is about building the solid foundation on which the nation runs. Fix the digital infrastructure at all levels of government. Put out wild fires, and provide other emergency relief. You're already paying people; that's generally the expensive part...
Re-institute the Manpower Board then, the government’s management of large amounts of manpower means they have a vested interest in their training. Look to the military, kids turn into marines, fighter pilots, engineers.
The US has a long history of conscription, I don’t think this concept is as foreign as your response indicates. Conscription, the word, though, is not confined just to military service, but to state service.
Targeting 100% employment is a way of providing a UBI while also allowing the government to extra some value. It doesn’t particularly matter what they do, the government is just subsidising some economic activity (But the money is already spent, they just need a place to spend the labor, which is a good that is taxed by time itself). Works could be provided to companies or industries that are deemed a social good even. Maybe it is advantageous for a government to subsidise farms with labor instead of dollars due to the stability 100% employment could give to people.
I think you’re missing the overall point, though, which is that this is the default case. There’s nothing stopping a worker from getting hired at a private entity for whatever wage they want. You can still be a software engineer at your company, your wife still report. What it guards against is labor being priced below the government’s rate unless there is another reason to take the job.
The original commenter asked for a way to mitigate risk of people becoming independent contractors competing to a below market wage, this is one solution that seems to alleviate that risk by providing a minimum market wage.
I have an image in my head of all my neighbors working at the same company. WTF would we be doing?
I’m a software engineer, my wife a reporter, my next door neighbor a nurse, the guy across the hall plays video games all day. His girlfriend is a cleaning lady.
This doesn’t include the sex offender down the street, the guys who shoot guns in the middle of the night, the drug addicted and mentally ill who hang out near the bus station, or any other “hard cases.”
So what would we be doing?