[firstOrder]

Unemployment is one of the pillars that capitalism is built on, it is a structural necessity for profits to exist, so any efforts to relieve it via reform are doomed to failure. Structural unemployment did not exist in Europe prior to Europe moving from feudalism to capitalism several centuries ago - structural unemployment is a creation of capitalism. One need only pick up the Wall Street Journal or Businessweek during times of low unemployment - there is great fear that unemployment is getting "too low", meaning everyone who wants a job can get a job. Since the purpose of capitalism is to generate profits for rentiers, this makes sense.

The schemes mentioned here and being floated about in Slate and the like are done in anticipation of how to respond to a sudden, massive increase in unemployment for low-skilled workers in response to advances in things like AI. These schemes wouldn't contradict what I said before, because they would be due to an economic shift where the lever of unemployment for low skilled workers would mean less, since the increased quantity of unemployed would change the quality of what unemployment is. The threat of sudden mass unemployment would mean less to increasing profits, and could potentially cause social unrest. Like Larry Page's grandfather wandering around a GM plant with a weapon in his hand during the Flint sit-down strike.

It's obvious that structural unemployment is a creation of capitalism, as it did not exist in centuries past. From reading the business press's fears of unemployment getting too low, it should be obvious that big business feels unemployment is an essential pillar of what they need to keep the system running as they wish. Despite this history and current expression of views, people seem to be blind to the reality that not only is the government not interested in helping unemployed people, but that it is actively promoting unemployment, and will fight and do anything to keep structural unemployment in place. It's not an accident trying to be fixed, the existence of ~0% unemployment is what would be seen as the accident, and any levers to throw some of those people out of work would (and have been) utilized. While this is the reality, the standard corporated owned and sponsored hegemonic press is of course oblivious to all of this. Unemployment isn't an accident government is trying to fix, when unemployment gets "too low" business and government actively work to increase unemployment among happily employed people.

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