When the federal government, or as we call it, the state, can create money and pay it to you for goods and your labor, you are a slave. You may be a happy slave, but you are indeed a slave to the money creators.
Yet that is exactly the system being promoted by prominent Democrats and supported by both Democrat and Republican voters alike.
Last spring the leftist rag The Nation commissioned a poll to determine whether Democrats should run on a platform to guarantee jobs for everyone. They asked pollsters to frame the question in a "way that would be most likely to gain opposition from voters." The question was framed as follows:
"Democrats in congress are proposing a bill which would guarantee a job to every American adult, with the government providing jobs for people who can’t find employment in the private sector. This would be paid for by a 5 percent income tax increase on those making over $200,000 per year. Would you be for or against this policy?"
Pollsters found the results stunning. "Even with explicit partisan framing and the inclusion of revenue in the wording, this is one of the most popular issues we’ve ever polled," said David Shor, a senior data scientist at Civis Analytics.
They learned that 52 percent of those polled supported a job guarantee plan. Only 29 percent opposed it. The rest were undecided.
To no one’s surprise, those who had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 were for it by a margin of 69 percent versus 16 percent opposed. Of those who voted for Donald Trump, 32 percent supported it. A majority of blacks (62 percent) and Latinos (55 percent) also support a federal job plan.
It’s a mystery as to why the pollsters found the poll results "stunning." Given the framing of the question and massive collectivist propaganda of the last 50-plus years, such a result should have been a given. Neither Democrats nor Republicans can ever say "no" to communism. They are taught from early on that government is the be all and end all. In school they are steeped in state worship and most kids today receive two meals (or more) provided by the state.
They are taught to hate the rich and envy their wealth. They’ve been pampered and presented with a pseudo-history that glosses over the millions of deaths and massive human misery caused by collectivist totalitarian systems.
Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders; and new Democrat darling and House candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have all proposed a federal jobs guarantee and high minimum wage.
"Guaranteed jobs programs, creating floors for wages and benefits, and expanding the right to collectively bargain are exactly the type of roles that government must take to shift power back to workers and our communities," Gillibrand told The Nation. "Corporate interests have controlled the agenda in Washington for decades so we can’t tinker at the margins and expect to rebuild the middle class and stamp out inequality. We need to get back to an economy that rewards workers, not just shareholder value and CEO pay."
The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) recently completed a study of a guaranteed jobs program as envisioned by collectivist politicians. The study focused on two prominent jobs guarantee programs designed by leftist think tanks and currently under consideration as a policy platform by Democrat presidential contenders mulling a run in 2020: one by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP report) and the other by the Levy Economics Institute (Levy report).
The jobs plans would cover 10 million to 17 million workers. The plans differ in wage guarantees — the CBPP plan suggests different wages based on skills, performance, geographic region and tenure while the Levy plan sets a $15 wage for all enrollees — but they are similar in the following respects:
- Mandating the acceptance of any adult American, on demand, for an indefinite length of time.
- Paying an average wage around $15 per hour, for both part- and full-time options.
- Providing health insurance and other benefits.
- Projecting enrollment of more than 10 million workers.
- Relying most of the time on states and especially local governments to create and assign work to individual participants.
- Broadly highlighting infrastructure, education, health, the environment, and culture as areas of work for enrollees.
- Assigning work to participants via government-run offices using a database or "job bank."
- Attempting to avoid crowding out work already being done in the private, public and nonprofit sectors.
Both plans would funnel millions of dollars into large federal and state bureaucracies to manage the program. They would also distort the labor market and wages. Additionally, they would disincentivize workers from acquiring advanced job skills that would result in real, value-enhancing job creation in the private labor market, locking workers into low-end dead-end jobs.
Nor do they address what is going to motivate workers to perform menial tasks beyond a rudimentary level if there is no incentive for them to do so. History has shown that in communist/socialist systems in which people were assigned jobs, those tasks eventually were done poorly and inefficiently if they were done at all.
The U.S. already leads the world in our lazy and don’t care work ethic. Very few people really work anymore. Nor do many want to take responsibility for their welfare, choosing instead to rely on the state for sustenance and succor. Voters and politicians embrace Social Security, Medicare and its expansions, Medicaid, No Child Left Behind, a greater regulatory state and most parts of Obamacare. There is no stomach among even the most "conservative" Americans for cutting social and corporate welfare programs.
The Nation’s proposal of a tax increase aside, neither plan makes mention of how an additional budget item that equals or exceed the Pentagon’s 2018 budget will be paid for.
The answer, of course is through money creation. Collectivist systems are not possible without fiat money. And on top of that comes heavy progressive taxation. The system cannot survive unless the volume of money is regulated through taxation.
Collectivism and fiat money both thrive on the darkest sins of man’s heart: greed and guilt manipulation. Fiat money appeals to the greed of men by asserting that it is possible to be wealthy without hard work and creativity — that one can create wealth merely by accumulating paper that has been arbitrarily numbered and assigned a fictitious value. Hence its allure to the pampered and deceived public. And this is the allure of guaranteed jobs programs.
Collectivist systems, whether they are called democracy, socialism, communism or fascism, are philosophies of envy. When one sees something another has and decides he wants it, rather than earn it on his own merits he wants the power of government to take it and either give it to him or redistribute it to the masses. Often the collectivist doesn’t want that something for himself as much as he doesn’t want someone else to have it.
Collectivism is also a philosophy of racism, weakness, ineptitude and collectivism in that it assumes one gained what he has by way of special privilege not afforded everyone if they are of a different race or creed or social standing; and that one cannot obtain a thing or advance economically without the assistance of government or the collective.
It is a disguised system of stealing the wealth and production of the producers of wealth with spurious laws under the legitimacy of the vote. Stealing or taking from producers and transferring it to nonproducers is very sophisticated and concealed class warfare.
Collectivist systems, as they grow and mature, require strong, authoritarian police state backing to enforce the myriad laws needed to make them work and steal the wealth and property from individuals for distribution to the state. They are anathema to human liberty and a concealed form of slavery.
Yours for the truth,
Bob Livingston
Editor, The Bob Livingston Letter™
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