[bioh42_2]

John Maynard Keynes did suggest welfare should be employing people to do things, even pointless things like building giant structures and them demolishing them again.

It seems silly, but if we truly recognize that long term unemployment has a horrible way of killing one's ability hold a job, then Keynes idea is rather practical.

The government not as welfare but simply as employers of last resort. Much like the Fed is the lender of last resort.

Obviously this has the danger of government employees lobbying for ever better pay until it is economically irrational for people to seek work in the private sector.

[rst]

How about putting back together giant structures that are falling apart? Our infrastructure is rotting away --- that Minneapolis bridge collapse in 2007 was a bit of a wake-up call. There's no shortage of stuff in the United States that needs to get fixed.

[pmb]

You mean some sort of administration that would give people money to work on projects? Like a Work Projects Administration?

Sorry, Roosevelt did that, but nowadays I am pretty sure it would be called socialism.

[rst]

Not nearly as socialistic as Nixon's mandatory wage and price controls. (Cue Glenn Beck rant: there's a reason Nixon went to China!)

You're quite right about the rhetoric, but it's completely unmoored from reality.

[anamax]

> You mean some sort of administration that would give people money to work on projects? Like a Work Projects Administration?

Those sorts of projects/spending got killed in 08 because womens' groups objected to money going to "burly men" projects.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/00...

Of course, govt spending is always political. At one time, one could both pay off supporters and build up the country. When we have to choose, the former always wins.

[anamax]

Note that this has been a "mancession". See http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/06/happy-fathers-day-its-st... and the update http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2011/... .

[Unseelie]

So...when the government pays people to do things, that's socialism?

I seriously doubt that's how a governmental program training and employing the youth to repair the infrastructure would be viewed, and especially not as proposed to the more socialistic policy of welfare.

[mmt]

So...when the government pays people to do things, that's socialism?

Of course, but the statement itself is a bit meaningless and appeared to me to be flippant, at that.

When the government pays people not to do things, that's a more extreme form of socialism.

To me, the question is one of subsidy. UI[1] is a 100% subsidy. A WPA type of deal could potentially be no subsidy at all, at least to the individuals. It would merely be directing tax money at a particular kind of boondoggle.

[1] Notwithstanding that the I stands for "insurance," since it's structured as a tax, at least here in the US.

[earl]

Seriously? Have you lived in the US for the last 10 years or seen a Republican recently? rst, if anything, understated how Republicans would attack such a program.

[prostoalex]

Wouldn't you need some specialized skills for that? Trusting unemployed psychology majors with bridge reenforcement doesn't inspire much confidence.

[wonderzombie]

After the housing bust, I'm thinking you could find plenty of construction workers with necessary and/or relevant skills.

[VladRussian]

"unemployed psychology majors" could do some work in special education or nursing homes for disabled and old or half-way homes for addicts, etc.. . Their skills would definitely be of much help there.

[adrianN]

You only need one brain to tell the hands what to do.

[yummyfajitas]

Wait, didn't we already drop hundreds of billions fixing that? Or was that money just wasted?

http://www.recovery.gov/Transparency/RecipientReportedData/P...

[mkr-hn]

Not all of it, and what did wasn't enough to fix much of what's broken.

[Alex3917]

"John Maynard Keynes did suggest welfare should be employing people to do things, even pointless things like building giant structures and them demolishing them again."

In his lifetime though we already did this. If you were too poor to get by then you could go live at the town farm where you would receive public assistance in exchange for working.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poorhouse

[marquis]

You would think that all a government has to do is supply assistance to trades people to hire/train apprentices. I had a cousin go into the Navy just to learn a trade which upset me, as in previous decades he could have learnt the same trade by entering an apprenticeship. I belive some countries like Austria still support these programs, I have friends whose teenage boys left school early but were able to enter a subsidised apprenticeship rather than drop out and become unemployable.

[loewenskind]

I wouldn't have them do utterly useless jobs like this, but rather government jobs that need doing but don't take years of training. There will always be some churn of unemployment anyway, we should take advantage of it. Why hire someone to do this kind of job when we have people literally sitting around looking for something to do?

Of course to balance this you would need to raise unemployment benefit and get rid of this shameful "food stamp" concept. Everyone on unemployment gets a fair living wage, they just have to work part time in some government job with bursts to full time when needed (e.g. holidays, etc.).

[_delirium]

Hmm interesting; I vaguely remember that, but had forgotten about the concept and term. Looks like it's still a fairly active idea being debated by economists, though not so much by politicians: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22employer+of+last+reso...

[thingie]

There is a term for that, in Czech: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hladov%C3%A1_ze%C4%8F

[Tichy]

If he truly said that, I am even less inclined than before to see the merit of his theories. Not that I know them in detail, but this makes me not want to know them.

If people are still able and looking for jobs, their time is better spent looking for jobs than doing pointless tasks. This can be a real problem - writing applications (if that is your approach) takes a lot of time, and if you do 14 hours of taxi driving per day, there is less time for finding that job that would suit you better.

Then there are the people on welfare who are really sick or disabled - why should they have to build giant structures, and how?

Lastly there might be people exploiting the system, but I suspect they are not that many. At least were I live, being on welfare is actually work, anyway, because you have to wade through tons of bureaucracy to get it and stay on it.

[gaius]

I agree, but Charles Dickens made that politically impossible. "Are there no workhouses?" Etc.

[rdouble]

WPA was long after Dickens.

[gaius]

I don't know what that is, some American thing?

Here in the UK every time it's suggested the word "Dickensian" gets bandied about and that's that.

[_delirium]

It's the main historical example of a make-work program in the U.S., during the Great Depression: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

Perhaps because the WPA is a lot more recent, it seems to be the thing Americans think of when a make-work program is suggested. I don't think I've ever heard them criticized as Dickensian; instead they tend to be criticized as socialist.

[gaius]

Paying people to make stuff isn't a bad idea, if your government would be doing public works (e.g. roads) anyway, you just get to do that stuff a bit quicker.

Paying people to do made-up jobs (e.g. most of the UK public sector) just destroys wealth.

[lukeschlather]

If the jobs are truly pointless, they're not destroying wealth. Rather, they redistribute wealth. And even if they do destroy wealth (and you need to provide examples of specific positions and why they are counterproductive and not just unproductive) the destruction may be evened out by keeping them in the working mindset and being a normal member of society.

[mdemare]

If these people would otherwise be unemployed, and if their wages are modest, then it doesn't destroy any wealth, and if what they do is even slightly useful, it creates wealth.