Shacking Up with Justice

Why Prosperity without Rights Only Increases Social Anxiety

Democrats have a way of issuing 1000 solutions that make you more anxious about the problem.

If you want a job, here is an infrastructure bill. If you want healthcare, here is Obamacare. At the end of these solutions, you still feel like a pawn to market forces beyond your control, even if the results are slightly better.

In the same way that there isn’t an obvious material difference between shacking up with your significant other, having kids, etc., and being married, yet there is an enormous difference between shacking up with your significant other, having kids, etc. and being married. That’s the difference between Democratic programs around jobs and healthcare, and a government that secures rights around jobs and healthcare.

Democrats lose because they are ideologically and financially invested in pretending that market-based solutions will solve the anxiety of having your life dependent upon market-based solutions.

People who are looking for a job don’t want to hear about the CHIPs Act or Biden’s Infrastructure Bill. These all sound like a trickle down jobs program. They want to go to an office, fill out a basic form, and be told to report to work the next day for the next stage of their paid interview/sorting process.

They want to be told that they’ll get paid $14 dollars an hour during the interview/sorting process, then when they show up for their on-the-job training, they’ll be paid $25 an hour for their on the job training, plus benefits and union membership.

This latter process acknowledges that being a functional and free American requires secure access to a good job. Not a job opportunity; a good job. Regardless of how incompetent your parents were in raising you. Regardless of your history with the criminal justice department. You need access to a good job if you are going to be an American.

Just as people don’t want an opportunity for healthcare; they want healthcare. They don’t want an opportunity for a good job; they want a good job. When politicians talk about free job training, that’s ultimately felt to be a ruse to shift the precarity of securing a good job onto the most vulnerable person in the equation: the job-seeker.

Democrats don’t get this because they think that market-based programs
will address market-based anxiety. These are people who don’t understand that Obamacare doesn’t address the core frustration of not knowing whether you have healthcare.

This problem is as old as the modern economy, and the solution always begins with a federal job guarantee.