Thread by @ActivistMMT

🧵 regarding concerns about the #MMT-JG.

I read both. Based on these two articles, it seems to suggest that you believe the MMT-JG can only make things worse because it will exacerbate the negative aspects of our terrible extractive and predatory capitalist economic system.

https://twitter.com/buchmanster/status/1431662914520424459

The one article says we should instead "grant people the freedom and grace to pursue non-economic means of living". How exactly do you propose giving people a non-economic means of living in a society where the government’s money is a critical ingredient for day-to-day survival?

#MMT’s solution is to create an entire new category of jobs: "valuable but not profitable": Give people wages for producing things that are valuable to THEM, their FAMILY, & COMMUNITY – but NOT valuable to those who only consider profit (the pursuit of more money) as valuable.

Many examples of valuable-but-not-profitable jobs (a “caring economy”) can be found under items 8 and 8a here: pavlina-tcherneva.net/job-guarantee-…

Feel free to go ahead and create a society that provides its people with a “non-economic means of living”. Until that day, #MMT provides a solution that can greatly reduce mass suffering in the almost-purely economic system that we currently live in, here in reality.

The JG is about providing an alternative to the involuntarily unemployed – people who desperately want a job or a better job. It’s about giving people who desperately want something, that something.

The involuntarily unemployed are largely those at the bottom. The JG, in other words, empowers those at the bottom.

However, the JG is not about "jobs". It’s about stabilizing the macroeconomy – preventing too-high highs and too-low lows. There are only, and exactly, two ways to manage a society: By keeping all people employed, or by keeping some unemployed.

If you choose the former, then you’re explicitly choosing to keep millions (mostly at the bottom) involuntarily unemployed.

If you choose neither, then you are passively choosing to keep millions (mostly at the bottom) involuntarily unemployed. Either way, by not explicitly choosing the JG, you are essentially choosing mass, real-word suffering for millions at the bottom.

I’m not entirely sure what your objection is to the MMT-designed job guarantee, but it seems pretty clear that it’s based on some deeply cynical assumptions. I don’t share them.

Again:

https://twitter.com/activistmmt/status/1431659533131296770