Slavery Smells?

I am conservative, but I actually like Bernie Sanders.  I am no "Bernie Bro".  I certainly do not support all of Sanders' platform.  I think he has his head in the right place though, which is more than I can say for other Democratic Presidents.  But then, Sanders is not really a Democrat, is he?  Actually, no, he is not.  Sanders is more of a conservative socialist.  Conservative?  Really?  Yep, conservative.  Sanders' platform is actually not even close to liberal.  Medicare for All is certainly more conservative than a public option, which has little real world precedent or testing and would cause far more major change (the hallmark of liberalism) than Medicare for All.  His Federal job guarantee thing is actually more reactionary than even conservative, drawing from ideas that have arisen in different ways, multiple times throughout both American and world history.  Also, the Federal job guarantee is founded very firmly in the conservative/reactionary "work to live" culture, that preaches that people who are not doing productive work do not deserve to live (which I have written about before).

There is more to it than that though.  The Federal job guarantee idea stinks of slavery.  One of the most common justifications of slavery in the early U.S. was the assertion that slaves were people who were too dumb to get by on their own, so society had a responsibility to provide them with productive jobs that could satisfy their needs.  Many ancient civilizations mobilized the poor for building infrastructure, often against their will but also often voluntarily, using their poverty to coerce them into doing very grueling and sometimes deadly work that never carried any promise for advancement.  In the U.S., when we hear the word "slavery" we tend to imagine people legally owned by other people and forced into manual labor by their masters, but this "chattel" slavery is actually not as historically common as other types of slavery.  The most common types of slavery are more similar to feudalism, where the "serfs" are technically under an inherited contract to work the land and provide a portion of the harvest to the landowner.  In some regions and time periods, serfs could even terminate the contract at will, making them free to leave.  Few, if any, ever did though, because they could not afford to.  The land always belonged to the governing lord or to the national government.  A serf could not cancel a contract and continue to work the land for his or her own personal benefit.  A serf that bailed out would never find a lord willing to agree to a work contract again.  Serfs were not trained in commerce or productive crafts.  The experience of a lifetime of farm work was only valuable for farm work, and as mentioned before, no lord would take a serf that had canceled a contract.  Serfs were de facto slaves.  No, they were not owned.  They were either permanently contracted to their plot of land, or they were free but permanently attached to the land by their own poverty.

The most common type of slave, historically, was agricultural slave, but most ancient nations employed some form of slavery in nearly all infrastructure work.  Infrastructure work was typically to grueling and dangerous for free people who were not in poverty to be willing to do.  So, governments would instead either buy slaves or advertise infrastructure work to the destitute, who had no other choice but to take any work offered, because they would starve otherwise.  Taskmasters often felt justified in abusing even voluntary infrastructure workers, because they were poor, and the poor have always been viewed as justified targets of mistreatment.  Even in the modern U.S., the poor are common targets of law enforcement and legislative abuse.  The Federal job guarantee, which is supposed to provide the poor with infrastructure jobs, just reeks of the sort of slavery that has been used throughout history to build up the infrastructure of the vast majority of historical nations.

It is actually unsurprising that the Democratic Party would be the biggest proponent of such a program.  It was, after all, the political party created expressly for the purpose of defending slavery.  It may have changed a lot over the last 192 years, but clearly the underlying ideology that some people are too dumb to take care of themselves without heavy intervention is still there, and it seems to be leading toward a type of slavery that is fairly new in the U.S. but that has been the most common type of slavery historically.

There are a ton of problems with the Federal job guarantee program.  The first is that it only really helps the poor that need it the least.  A Federal job guarantee would only help able bodied and able minded people who can get regular jobs fairly easily.  It will not help most people with physical or mental disabilities that make it hard to get or keep a regular job.  Much like Obamacare, which attempted to force people to buy health insurance, a Federal job guarantee has a lot of holes people will slip through, and most of those holes are neatly lined up with the holes in the existing system.  It will help some people, but the vast majority will be people who do not actually need the help, and it will not serve most of the people who do need the help.

The second problem with the Federal job guarantee is mistreatment.  Mistreatment of slaves, while not actually as common as people often assume, has always been common, especially of non-chattel slaves in infrastructure work.  (Slave owners typically treated their slaves quite humanely, because they paid significant amounts of money for them, making slaves a valuable investment.  Infrastructure slaves, however, were typically not legally owned and were considered expendable, eliminating most motivation for good treatment.)  Abuse of prisoners in the U.S. is quite common.  There is no reason to believe that overseers for poor people taking advantage of a Federal job guarantee will not also engage in mistreatment.  And no, there will not be enough oversight to prevent it.  Law enforcement abuse of the free poor in the U.S. is rampant, but it rarely gets reported, because poor people cannot afford Federal law suits, and when it does get reported, courts consistently trust police over poor people, often regardless of evidence.  There is no reason to believe abuse of poor infrastructure workers is any more likely to be reported.

The third problem with the Federal job guarantee program is that it does not even solve the problem it is supposedly intended to solve.  The Federal job guarantee program is an alternative to a basic income, which is typically justified on the idea that automation is going to rapidly reduce the availability of jobs in the U.S. (and Sanders has even directly presented the Federal job guarantee as a solution for growing automation).  A Federal job guarantee will only delay that.  The reason we need a lot of infrastructure work in the U.S. is that we have neglected infrastructure for over a generation.  We might have a few decades of infrastructure work to catch up, but once we are caught up, the need for work will drop very dramatically.  In addition, automation is not going to ignore infrastructure.  If we are getting self driving cars in the next decade, you can be sure we are also going to get self driving paving vehicles.  We already have concrete extruding technology that could be adapted to making side walks and constructing bridges with minimal human intervention.  Even things like laying bullet train tracks could be partially automated.  And automation is only going to get cheaper.  Eventually, the Federal job guarantee will be reduced to low value or no value work that would be better to let the private sector handle and that ends up being more wasteful (and thus expensive) than our current disaster of a welfare system.

The fourth problem is that some of the specifics of the infrastructure candidates are talking about are either nonsensical or just straight up harmful.  Sanders likes to talk about "environmentally friendly" infrastructure projects, like wind and solar power arrays, but more and more evidence is showing these technologies to generally be more harmful than clean fossil fuel power generation like natural gas, in no small part because they require more traditional energy production methods to provide reliable power (often dirty coal, to mitigate the high costs of wind and solar power).  Both wind and solar power, at large scale, pose a serious threat to wildlife.  When asked about these issues, politicians blow the harm off as minimal, because our current systems do not do a lot of net harm.  This is because the vast majority of the nation is still running on fossil fuel or nuclear power though.  If we phase these out and replace them with wind and solar, our current wind and solar infrastructure is going to balloon into something enormous, and these trivial amounts of wildlife being harmed will also balloon into something enormous.  We are talking potential extinctions of multiple species of birds and land animals.  Just small scale solar arrays we have already built have significantly impacted at least one endangered species, and proposed solar arrays in other places are causing experts serious concern about potential extinction of endangered species.  And these arrays are in deserts, where there is generally less wildlife to be concerned about in the first place.  In short, candidates advocating for the Federal job guarantee are planning to use it to build infrastructure that will definitely do massive environmental harm and has a high potential for causing extinctions of already endangered species.

The fifth problem with the Federal job guarantee is that it is likely to have a serious negative effect on the economy.  With or without an increase in minimum wage, the Federal job guarantee will likely create more stable jobs than the low end of the private sector.  This might help the workers who take advantage of it, but it will destroy existing lower end businesses, on a massive scale.  If the Federal job guarantee pays a higher wage than the minimum wage, it will not just attract poor people who are having a hard time finding a job.  It will attract millions of people who already have jobs, leaving the businesses they were originally working for without workers.  This will either cause them to go out of business or massively accelerate the automation of lower end jobs.  If the Federal job guarantee only pays minimum wage, regardless of whether the minimum wage is changed as part of the deal, it will still destroy the lower end of the economy.  A Federal job guarantee will provide full time work, at at least minimum wage, guaranteed.  This is way better than a job at say, McDonald's, where you will be lucky to get more than 20 hours a week, and you can be fired at the whim of practically anyone above you.  If a Federal job guarantee bill passes, be prepared for pretty much all fast food, most big box stores (Walmart, Fred Meyers, Ikea, etc...), and most small businesses (currently the largest source of employment in the U.S.) to either go under or automate at least 99% of their processes.  A Federal job guarantee might provide jobs for everyone, but once the dust settles, there might be a lot less available for people to buy with the money they are making, and in the long run, it will guarantee that there will be far fewer private sector jobs available.

The sixth problem with a Federal job guarantee is that it comes with very limited potential for advancement.  Most infrastructure work requires a very small number of experts and a huge amount of grunt labor.  Building roads and assembling power plants provides experience in skills that have little value outside of building roads and assembling power plants, and when the government has a monopoly on infrastructure work, there is not going to be much competitive demand for those skills.  The cost of a Federal job guarantee will be so high, especially in administration, that there will be a very strong incentive to avoid paying anyone much more than minimum wage.  And as the cost of automation drops, there will be an even stronger incentive to keep wages low, because if automation becomes cheaper than wages, the whole system will fall apart.  At that point, if the government does not automate, the private sector will, and then it will be cheaper for local and state governments to employ private companies instead of contributing jobs to the Federal job guarantee, and Congress might even decide to save money by reducing the scope of the Federal job guarantee and paying private companies to do the infrastructure work, leaving a bunch of people with highly trained skills in fields that are nearly 100% automated and no longer need any human labor.  If a Federal job guarantee cannot provide advancement opportunities and eliminates a lot of jobs that do have those opportunities, that is a very distinct backsliding, that will only serve to keep poor people poor, just like our current welfare system.



These are only the top six problems with the Federal job guarantee, and it really bothers me that Sanders and other Democratic candidates cannot see this.  This is an ancient idea that did get stuff done, but it did so at the expense of the poor, not to the benefit of the poor.  Adjusting it by making the wages higher is not going to help, and any Federal job guarantee that ends up giving people a better deal than private businesses can offer is going to do extreme damage to the economy.  The advantage with mistreating the slaves is that anyone who can get a job in the private sector will do it, but while some mistreatment will almost certainly occur, in our current culture it probably will not be enough to prevent a mass exodus from private sector jobs, and when the Federal job guarantee inevitably ends, because the government can no longer afford the administrative costs of paying a large portion of the population to be unproductive, America will find itself in deeper poverty than it has ever been in, in its entire history, because there will not be any jobs for the poor.

There was a time when Sanders at least liked the idea of a basic income.  That is the Sanders I might be willing to vote for, despite being a conservative.  (Of course, basic income is actually a conservative idea at this point.  It has been tested and proven repeatedly, and half a century ago, the right almost passed a basic income bill in the U.S..  Basic income is not a new and risky, liberal idea anymore.  It is a tried and tested idea with a great deal of proven benefits and thus far no significant downsides.)  I am not sure I can vote for a candidate who plans on destroying both the environment and the economy with a Federal job guarantee that amounts to the revival of ancient infrastructure slavery.  When did Sanders bail out on his dedication to the well being of the people, and join the side of the political machine that sees people as nothing more than tools of the government?