An engineer can have a cook and a driver if they make ten times as much as a cook or a driver; this arrangement doesn't really work if a typical engineer makes e.g. two or three times as much.

Yes, there would be a larger total demand for labor if we allowed the price to drop below that. But we don't. As we cut off the market to allow only transactions above the "livable wage" price floor, then at that price level we have a surplus of labor supply and a lack of demand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

It seems that you are from India, can you give an anecdotal example of how large is difference between the income of "typical" experienced white collar specialist and the income of cheapest maids, cooks or cigarette walas, the bottom part of the labor pool?

E.g. in the UK the median hourly wage is roughly twice as much as the minimum; the very very lowest possible paying job pays half that of a "normal" average job; and statistics show that the median salary of a software engineer, considered a lucrative career, is 6 times that of the minimum.

Obviously the average person can't buy much of services (no matter how unskilled and lowpaid) of others, since buying 40 hours/week of anyone costs at least half of their total income; and a software engineer could have a full-time (again, 40hr/week not the whole week) cook/maid/driver/whatever only if he paid him at least 1/6th of his total income.

This is quite feasible economically in the US - suppose cleaning a home takes 2 hours and a maid accepts $10/hour. That's $20/day or $430/month (assuming 5x/week). So in the US you could get comparable levels of service for maybe $1000/month. It's just not feasible right now because maids cost a lot more than $10/hour.

A maid working 10 hours/day, 5 days/week would be earning $2150/month. For comparison, US GDP/capita works out to $4,400/month. (Mean wage/compensation is a bit lower than this.)

But you don't even need to look at money to determine this is feasible. You just need to count. Take the number of people sitting around on welfare/disability fraud/etc, multiply by the number of houses they could clean each day, and you can determine how many maids the US could have.

The middle class in USA definitelly can't afford to pay $12k/year (plus taxes!) for such a service. The most highly paid white collar professions would generally scoff at such an expense. At best, the top 1% could afford that, but they don't employ that much maids because there's not so many so rich people.

All I'm proposing is that we restructure things so that instead of getting nothing for your money you get something.

Okay, there's a sense in which that's true, but...

> All I'm proposing is that we restructure things so that instead of getting nothing for your money you get something.

The problem with that (aside from any other problems with the whole "basic job" idea) is that the only sense in which it the preceding claim is true is if you count medical and contribution-qualified programs for the aged and disabled (which are the bulk of payments "to people who don't work".)

I mean, this characterization is ludicrous unless your plan is to drag people out of nursing homes to serve in your Basic Job Army.

I've linked to this expose by NPR on disability fraud before: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

I'm saying that the overwhelming majority of government spending on the non-working is benefits to the aged and disabled.

SS and Medicare alone are the majority of such spending, and go exclusively to that group, and overwhelming to the aged specifically; the next big chunk is Medicaid (at least, the portion that goes to people that aren't working, some Medicaid beneficiaries are low-income but employed) which, while income qualified, has a very significant fraction of its expenses go to Medicaid/Medicare dual eligibles.

And, so, to the extent that your pointing to the share of government spending that goes to the non-working is intended as something other than a red herring, it only makes sense if you plan on dragging the aged and disabled into your forced labor army as a condition of their continued survival.

But in most urban metros, cost of human labor is only going up. Washing machines are all over the places, dryers which were absent even a few years back are showing up. Robot vacuum cleaners are replacing few-hours/day maids all the time.

This is even more so in high rising apartments. Maid culture and personal servant culture in India is ending with urban living.

Also, do you know anyone on welfare in the US? Do they really seem like they're "sitting around" to you?

US has more a problem of strict tax accountability for upper-middle-to-lower classes, while none for the rich. And lack of chances to breaking income ceilings. Swim lanes in US are decided in the first 20-25 years of life and things are pretty much set from there on.

While in India we still have people eating rotis(Indian flat bread) made out wild grass with salt once/twice a day merely to stay alive.

In many cases Americans refuse to hire them, for cultural reasons that may be the flip side of Americans refusing to do them. Child care is one that there seems to be a lot of (at least, one hears about it a lot), but maid, cook, butler, and even general handyman are positions that many Americans won't consider hiring someone for, in any stable, ongoing way.

I have no problem hiring an electrician to come in and rewire parts of my (1950s era) house, because the maximum I'm willing to pay is above the minimum I would need to pay to avoid feeling like I was cheating them. For full-time cook or maid or general laborer, the willing-max is below the fair-min.

The common solution to sticky nominal wages is economic stimulus; inflate away real wages to trick people into hiring at lower real wages. Do you think that would fix this issue?

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.

http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_534.pdf

http://www.epwp.gov.za/

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.

...

> Americans just refuse to do them

Lots of Americans work as cooks, work cleaning homes, or work in child care. Wages in all three of those areas are quite low, there's not demand for a lot more that would provide livable wage in any of them.

Then why have real wages dropped for much of the population, and why is the labor share of GDP at an all-time low?

Secondly, your claims about market prices are not even directionally correct. Real wages have dropped because compensation has shifted from wages to benefits. (This effect is larger at the bottom, since non-wage benefits are a fixed cost while wages are variable.) Real compensation per hour has only gone up.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB

The labor share of GDP is down mainly because investment income (primarily from housing) has increased faster than labor income.

https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/deciphering-the-fall...

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...

Also, significant chunks of the economy have moved into non-labor personal income as the government has shifted from infrastructure/public goods to wealth redistribution.

If taxable wages are preferable to non-taxable benefits, should we eliminate the various laws (e.g. Obamacare, 401k) that push employers to provide benefits rather than wages?

Also, there are many market distortions that won't push wages up but will still create scarcity. For example, we could simply ban food vendors/cigarette walas/etc, or we could impose various occupational licensing rules that raise wages for some while lowering them for others. Why are those not worth thinking about?

Their safety net is a job guarantee rather than the US's ragbag of free money programs (welfare, disability fraud [1], etc), so you don't get to enjoy a life of leisure under any circumstance. In the US, it's pretty easy to get free money and play video games all day.

Second, their regulatory structure doesn't destroy as many low skill jobs as ours does (e.g. in the US, a cigarette wala like Eric Garner gets executed, and the cops shut down many food trucks).

[1] NPR did an expose a while back on the massive levels of disability fraud in the US. Apparently it's now a shadow welfare system, significantly larger than actual welfare: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

For example, electric power consumption per capita is 765 kWh in India, 12,988 kWh in the USA. [1]

1: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC