What about those who can’t find a job? Minimum wage hurts them (since higher minimum wage -> less jobs).
This is demonstrably false. Higher minimum wage may cause some employers to cut back employment or find alternatives to hiring (robotics) but the aggregate effect is a gain from the economic activity created by having more money in the economy. This may be mitigated by the loss of some safety net benefits, but is that really an argument we want to make for paying people less?
I would prefer a federal job guarantee administered by state and local leadership to UBI because the eventual result of everyone getting a check for their basic needs will be a drastic cut in wages, as employers will no longer have the safety net to compete with for labor. All work will become tasks performed for “extra money”, similar to welfare recipients now working for cash under the table. This would result in a massive increase in profits for employers and that would only fuel more inequality. Advancements in AI may eventually give us little choice as no level of wages can compete with it, but I think we should simply cross that bridge when we get to it.
In the interim, the primary job of workers in a consumption economy will be “consumer”, and that requires sufficient disposable income to support an economy. With the federal government acting as the employer of last resort, but offering living wages and benefits and giving the worker the choice of participation, wages would have to compete to draw workers. There is certainly no shortage of jobs that could be assigned that would be beneficial to society, as a short walk in any US city would prove, so the program would be more than simple “make work”.
Talents and training could be utilized for the public good and many workers could easily be happy with never re-entering the private work force. A job guarantee would better hold down inflation and give workers back some level of economic influence that has been absent since unions began losing ground in the 70’s. It would also reinvigorate a waning sense of community involvement and provide needed labor for tasks that have no path to profitability but are critically important just the same. A job guarantee would also be a much easier political sell than simply sending everyone free money every week, as it better caters to the concept of meritocracy that Americans seem to have accepted.
