The Job Guarantee Is A Good Idea.

Do the ends justify the means?I'll admit that this program would have a good end: bringing unemployment down to 0. However, the means through which this is achieved is essentially through coercion and force. In order to pay for the jobs that the government would be offering these people, they would have to tax other people. In other words, they would have to steal money from some people and give it to their employees. Even though it's a good end, I don't believe it justifies the means. Some people may believe it does. However, we all consider charities to be wonderful organizations. Yet they do not operate on the basis of forcing people to give them money to give it to the needy. They always operate on a voluntary charitable donation to give it to the needy. The government does not do this, and this is my first issue with this job guarantee program. I'm sure we would have issue with charities stealing from some people to give to others, so why should we tolerate the government doing that?There is an alternative solution to ending unemploymentA transition to a different economy than capitalism could definitely bring unemployment down. One such economy is known as cooperative individualism. Cooperative individualism is an economic system in which worker cooperatives are the dominant business structure in the society. Since 89% of people don't know what a cooperative is[1](let alone a worker cooperative) I'll provide the definition since you and/or voters likely don't know what they are. "A cooperative (also known as co-operative, co-op, or coop) is an autonomous association of people united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled business."[2] And a worker co-op is "a cooperative that is owned and self-managed by its workers."[3] Now, how would this bring unemployment down? Well, it's simple As you can see here, the average number of positions or employees a worker co-op has is 16[4](found by taking the number of cooperatives and dividing by the employees in those coops, so 12.6 million/770,000) and comparing it to the average for the traditional business, it is greater, where the traditional business has an average of just above 4[5]. Since worker-cooperatives generally do what is in best interest of the workers, they always try to offer more jobs than traditional businesses would. Traditional businesses would employ the minimum amount of people necessary to get the job done, while worker co-ops, on the otherhand, would have more interest in employing people for the sake of employing them. This, in turn, would increase the amount of jobs if worker co-ops were to be the majority in a society. Thus, unemployment would decrease, and would likely be at or close to 0%. If cooperatives were able to maintain the average of employing 16 workers and became the only existing business model, that would quadruple the amount of jobs out there, which is more than enough to end involuntary unemployment. In reality, we only need to increase the number of cooperatives in general though to a certain point to have more jobs. So, how would we go about transitioning to cooperative individualism? I'd say the first step is to educate people on this topic. 78% of people who do know about cooperatives, prefer to shop at those than traditional businesses[1], and since 89% of people don't know about them, just telling people about them would increase the amount of people who shop at worker coops, and thus bring the demand for worker coops to sky rocket and the worker coop sector of the economy would likely boom, resulting in a decrease of unemployment since more jobs would open. There are some other things that hold worker coops back from booming in the economy(such as how most people are ignorant about them), but by all means they should be booming if not for these factors(some other factors include that banks have an unfair bias against worker coops and pretty much never loan to them, the government only ever bails out capitalist businesses, whereas if they were allowed to fail, people may search for an alternative to the capitalist business model, etc). They are much more succesful than traditional businesses, and people prefer to shop at them like I said. I'm not going to offer specifics here about worker coops because that would be getting a little off-topic, but if you're interested, I'll link to a previous debate I had where I brought them up and pointed out how they are much more successful than traditional businesses[6]. While this debate I linked to is about capitalism, I specifically mention worker coops in it and bring up facts about how they are more successful than capitalist businesses. There's a potential for the government to choose to give specific people jobs and not othersWhat will force the government to provide a job equally to each of the unemployed? What if, for instance, because there are conservatives in charge of the government, they choose to only employ conservative people and leave liberals unemployed? Or vice versa if the government is liberal? What exactly would prevent that? What exactly holds the government to offering a job for all of the unemployed? Additionally, there could be other ways the government wouldn't offer jobs. Suppose we do have conservatives in power at the time, and there are a lot of illegal immigrants who are unemployed in our country. I doubt conservatives would be willing to have the government offer them jobs. Now, maybe you think it's a good thing not to give them jobs, since they're illegal. Well, there could still be other cases where you think, maybe someone should be given a job but the government doesn't think so. Ex-felons usually have a hard time getting a job when released from prison. Would the government offer them jobs? What if they decide not to give ex-felons jobs? I just don't see how the government would be compelled to offer everyone a job. They could be very picky about it. Local governments would likely be better at implementing such a policyI am very skeptical of the federal government offering programs such as this one. It's easy to argue that the federal government is more estranged from the average citizen and doesn't know all of the citizen's needs and wants. Local governmetns are more likely to know what their community needs and would be better at implementing ideas like this. It's much easier for a person to go to a city council meeting and talk with their city representatives than to commnicate with their congressperson. Additionally, that's only one congressperson you can talk to. In order for you to have a policy that you individually need, you need to concince majority of congress to go with it. A person can't do that as easily as they can convince their city council. Thus, I think a program like this should be implemented on the city, maybe even the state level, if we have to have it. I would still prefer to not have it, but I am even more opposed to the idea of the federal government doing this than the local governments.Sources:[1] http://www.geo.coop...[2] https://en.wikipedia.org...[3] https://en.wikipedia.org...[4] http://www.un.org...[5] https://smallbiztrends.com...[6] http://www.debate.org...