The Democrats are determined to revive slavery. This shouldn't be a big surprise. After all, the party was created with the express intent to protect the institution of slavery, and ever since the Republican Party successfully abolished slavery, the Democratic Party has been subtly trying to bring back various parts of it.
So what's this all about? How is the Democratic Party trying to bring back slavery? I must be some crazy conspiracy theorist right? Actually no. There's no conspiracy. This is just how the Democratic Party operates and how it was designed to operate. Fundamentally, the Democratic Party is about trying to create an economy where poor people are required to work for the lowest survivable compensation, for the benefit of the wealthy elite. First, see slavery. It wasn't actually successful in this. Modern Democrats like to claim that slavery significantly benefited free Americans (whom they assume were 100% white, as if black people were incapable of surviving without being slaves in the early U.S.), but the truth is, states that allowed slavery never did as well economically as the northern free states, and they consistently did worse by a large margin. Slavery was a scourge that caused economic harm, not an exploitation that created some kind of utopian society for the free people or even the elites. (The reason the South lost the war was that they didn't have a strong enough economy to provide the resources to win it. Their economy was weak because slavery can't produce strong economies.) Anyone who preaches that one particular class or race in the U.S. has some special privilege granted to them by the benefits of slavery is painting slavery as far more good and desirable than it actually is. Are Democrats painting slavery in a good light intentionally? Probably not, but intentional or otherwise, they are making it look better than it ever actually was. Strong economies are produced by maximizing participation and keeping regulation light, and slavery inherently limits participation, so slavery powered economies will never beat lightly regulated capitalist economies. (Some people believe slavery was part of capitalism. This is false. Capitalism is all about protection of private ownership, and the most fundamental part of this is ownership of self. Slavery was an artifact of the colonialist economic system that has no place in a capitalism economy.)
After slavery, Democrats pushed for segregation, because racial segregation gave them the power to decide who could work what jobs. Black people, ex-slaves and their descendants, were restricted from public facing work and separated from everyone else to limit association, leaving them mainly stuck in the domestic service sector, a sector where they had traditionally worked as slaves before abolition. By the 1960s, even many state level elected Democrats had realized how obviously morally corrupt this was, many segregation states had abolished segregation, and the remainder were rapidly heading in that direction. The Republican Party (a little late to the party this time) introduced the Civil Rights Act to codify the reforms that were already happening into Federal law. This was shut down repeatedly by Democrats, until Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon B. Johnson, possibly the most racist President in U.S. history (yes, even counting pro-slavery Democrats before abolition from Andrew Jackson up through James Buchanan), pressured Congressional Democrats to vote in favor of the bill as a tribute to and legacy of Kennedy, posthumously making Kennedy a martyr). It's popular among Democrats to blame Republicans for all of the work requirements attached to our welfare programs, but those were actually part of the Democratic welfare agenda starting right after the Civil Rights Act was passed. Without segregation, Democrats needed a new strategy to force poor people to work for as little as possible, and welfare programs with work requirements were the solution. (Making welfare more like a subsidy for employers than charity for the poor.) Republicans were easily convinced, because they were skeptical of expensive welfare programs in the first place (and rightfully so, as they were so disastrous that they've been being reformed (often by Democrats) regularly ever since to fix problems and they still are absolutely terrible), and work requirements that limited welfare spending mitigated the cost. Since then, Democrats have consistently favored welfare with work requirements, and Republicans have largely acquiesced to mitigate waste. Many Democratic voters have fooled themselves into believing that work requirements are concessions to the Republicans, who wouldn't help pass welfare programs without them, and while it is true that without work requirements fewer Republicans would vote to pass welfare bills, the truth is that this is merely a side effect of Democrats doing exactly what they wanted in the first place. Since the welfare programs of the 1960s and 1970s, Democrats have had control of both houses of Congress and the White House many times and for quite a large portion of that time, but they've never removed or reduced work requirements, and they've consistently included work requirements in most new welfare legislation. (The one exception is medical welfare, where qualification requirements are mostly managed at the state level, and most states, including Republican dominated states don't have work requirements.)
So, what now? It's not so much now as it is something that Democrats have been throwing around for a while. It's definitely a new strategy for getting cheap work out of people. Now, some might argue that Democrats can't be trying to pull stuff like this, because they support raising the minimum wage to a living wage. Even back during slavery, slave owners understood that underfed slaves whose needs weren't met couldn't be as productive. There are even manuals from that time period, instructing slave owners on how to maximize the productivity of their slaves. Ideas that slaves were generally underfed, housed in facilities with insufficient protection from the weather, and generally treated poorly are false. Even plantation slaves were fed quite well, provided with solid quality shelter (often group homes with many families though not always), provided with decent clothing appropriate to their work, and most plantation owners also treated their slaves with respect. (The stories are true, some were disrespectful, abusive, and even murderous, but these were a small minority. We hear the reports of the bad far more than the good.) This is because they were far more productive this way. After slavery was abolished, the Civil War was won by the North, and the slaves were freed, many continued to work on the plantations of their ex-masters, precisely because they had been treated well. Not to suggest slavery was ever anything but a horrific moral travesty, but Democrats from the very beginning wanted slaves to have enough to live contently, because content slaves are more productive. Raising the Federal minimum wage to provide that lifestyle of reasonable contentment is completely in line with the Democratic goal of controlling and extracting maximum labor from the poor!
The new plan of Democrats is the Federal Job Guarantee. On the surface, this looks like a good idea. If you want a job, and you can't find one, the Federal government will provide you with one that pays wages equivalent to the cost of supporting a slave (sorry, perhaps you prefer "person"?) sufficiently to maximize productivity. Now we can reduce unemployment to nothing, right? That's actually a separate question that I won't get into here (spoiler: the answer is no), as is the question of whether 0% unemployment is even a good thing (spoiler: also no). Anyhow, providing jobs for everyone that pay a living wage must certainly be a good thing that will eliminate poverty, right? The goal of eliminating poverty is a good one, but a Federal Job Guarantee is more like voluntary slavery than an effective anti-poverty program. Now the Federal government has 20 million lackeys, doing its bidding. If this isn't terrifying, you probably haven't studied world history (or even U.S. history...). I can raise you one here though, add any sort of welfare with work requirements and now you have involuntary slavery! On unemployment? You are legally required to look for a new job and accept any job you are offered, or you can just starve (your unemployment is canceled). If you don't accept a job you are offered, you don't only lose your current unemployment benefits, in most cases you no longer qualify ever again. This is true even if you are offered a job you are incapable of doing, due to disability, severe allergies, or other physical limitations. With a Federal Job Guarantee, this dynamic gets worse. Now if you lose your $120k job and get on unemployment to cover the gap while you find a new job, you can (and let's be honest, states will adjust their laws to ensure that this is the case) be required to apply for a Federal Job Guarantee position, which pays a minimal living wage. You will obviously qualify and get a job offer, because it's a job guarantee. Without the unemployment, you won't be able to pay your bills, and the slave wages of the Federal Job Guarantee won't even begin to make up the difference. So now you lose your home, your vehicles, and many of your other assets, even if you manage to eventually get a new $120k job. SNAP (food stamps) has a work requirement as well. It's not terrible, as it only applies to one person in the household (and everyone else can have benefits even if that one person, typically the oldest adult male, doesn't qualify), but single people will be forced to get a "guarantee" job to qualify, and smaller families (~3 people) often don't get sufficient food stamps even when one adult is working and everyone qualifies. And of course, there is also EITC. It's built directly into our tax code. The only welfare benefits you consistently qualify for if you don't have a job is health care, and even that is hit and miss in some cases. For example, in some states, college students don't qualify for Medicaid unless they also work 20 hours a week. You are covered if you are lazy, no good freeloader, but as soon as you start trying to improve your education to qualify for something better, nope, you are getting punished if you aren't splitting your time with a low pay, part-time job, limiting your ability to learn effectively. And even some states that don't have strict work requirements for SNAP in general do have similar punishments for college students who want SNAP benefits.
The fact is, the Federal Job Guarantee is the worst solution to unemployment ever conceived, aside from actual chattel slavery. Combined with welfare programs that include work requirements, it gives the government the right to force you to work for them or deny you any welfare benefits, if you can't instantly get some other job, and that's potentially a far worse welfare trap than any we have right now. Finding a job is a ton of work. How can you be expected to put in that much work on top of working 40 hours week doing the bidding of the government? Sure, some people manage to find a new job while working 40 hours a week. Ever wonder why so many Americans work in jobs they hate instead of finding new jobs? It's because those people who can manage finding a new job while working are very rare. In fact, most of them aren't looking and are offered new jobs unsolicited, without ever actually looking and working at the same time. The Federal Job Guarantee isn't some charitable government program, designed to improve the lives of Americans and provide work for all of the poor. It's a program designed to restore much of the mechanics of slavery, maximizing the productivity of the poor as efficiently as possible and forcing the poor to become cogs in the American economic machine. The fact is, this idea that people are merely elements of a giant economic machine that should play their roles with maximum efficiency and minimum complaint died in the 1920s, and should remain dead and buried, but the Democrats insist that this idea should be revived and that they should be put in charge of powerful machine they believe it can create.
The Federal Job Guarantee is fundamentally a pro-slavery program. The Republican Party abolished slavery over 150 years ago for good reason. If we allow this program to become law in the U.S., we can expect an economic nose dive, as the whole country returns to the terrible economic state of the 1800s, slavery powered South. Supposedly the majority of Americans on both sides of the aisle put the economy at the top of their list in terms of political importance the majority of the time, and even during global pandemics economics doesn't go below third place. If Americans truly care about the U.S. economy, support for the Federal Job Guarantee should be a reason not to vote for a candidate regardless of any other part of that candidate's platform (and regardless of that candidate's race, sex, sexual preferences, or personal beliefs about the candidates sexuality). The alternative is losing our status as a major economic power in the world and heading rapidly toward a collapsing slave economy, where most poor people work for the government being very productive in things that don't actually benefit anyone.
