It is "gaming", in the same sense that every decision you make to optimize toward a desirable outcome is "gaming".

40 years he had a choice; go work at the mill for $25/hr, and come home tired and dirty, or stay home and be unemployed, and face the scorn of his peers.

Now he has a choice, either go to "retraining" that is run by for-profit corporations hungry to suck up government funds, and whose "graduates" are still unemployable, or go on disability. Given the world he lives in, he made the best choice.

Now his choice involved some meaure of dishonesty. But while I'd love to live in a world that rewarded honesty and integrity, that's not the world we live in. We live in a world that has no place for a unskilled but hard-working individual, so those people have to take welfare to survive, welfare that they would likely refuse if there were better options.

The disability program is supposed to be if you are medically unable to work, not if you can't find a job. Look at the charts in the article, there isn't an epidemic of disability in this country, disability is being used as a substitute for traditional welfare programs which have been eliminated.

It isn't that I have no sympathy for people caught in the cracks, but we shouldn't have government programs that are de facto open only to those willing to lie and cheat.

I agree with you 100%. We shouldn't have a minimum wage, food stamps, disability funds, or even 90% of the termination laws. In their lieu, we should have basic income, universal healthcare, free higher education for people with the ability, and affordable housing for everyone. Then, companies can hire and fire whoever they want, and the much simpler (if more radical) system is harder to game. But... the latter is not the world we live in, and we're not likely to see it in the contemporary US.

That said, there is a real problem here with unemployable people and it's only going to get worse. It's no wonder no politicians want to talk about it. It can't be summed up in a ten-second blurb.

But what he's proposing isn't a command economy, it's a default economy. The government isn't telling Factory A to make widgets and it's not telling Person B to work as a basketweaver. Instead everyone gets some minimum amount of capital to use every month.

In fact it sounds more market-driven than what we have now with welfare and disability where, again, centrally-managed plans are laid out and imposed on employers and employees saying what requirements you have, what you can and can't use the money on, etc. And don't you dare get a job and start accidentally making too much money!

It might even be beneficial to employers looking for talented employees: If people are safe to shift around looking for jobs they should move away from poor managers and bad companies to good managers at good companies (and if you're a good manager you'd suddenly have a lot more talent to find the gems out of). This is one of the same resaons governments take such an interest in education, is to ensure a competitive workforce in relation to other nations in the global economy.

I'm sure there's more to work out with the proposal but I like the spirit of the idea.

Overall, the need for TARP was driven by the weak long term oversight allowing concentrated influence in overlarge companies. That's often viewed as a failure of government to remain independent from influence, but at the root of the problem I think it was a shift in economic philosophy across business schools and the business community. The long term fix in my view is putting new focus on defining what criteria lead to healthy, competitive markets. Businesses themselves should recognize that poor competitiveness, and short term focus in markets can lead to poor long term performance in the economy for everybody. Different mechanisms to discourage oversized companies should be introduced into legislation, but now I'm rambling....

Remember, command economies work so well when the leadership knows what they're doing that they make up the structure of every successful business in "market capitalist" countries.

Also, the failure to generate new economic activity (or supressing new activity) is a prevalent theme in failed companies. Furthermore, when you look at new innovative products coming out of large companies, you'll often spot a phase goes something like: "A small group of employees broke off and put together <widget> after hours or out of sight of the upper management, etc". The new activity or market areas often come in spite of the controls in big companies.

Scandinavian countries have put many of these ideas into place and they are hardly doomed. On the contrary they seem to be fairing pretty well.