A Right to Not Work?
Is it right-wing or left-wing to want people to have a right to NOT work if they just don’t want to?
I heard a great position from a 1950s economist about how the unemployed are a positive effect of a flexible workplace/economy, that paying “welfare” is an inherent cost of changeable markets. Essentially, some unemployment isn’t just inevitable, but “good, actually”, and having them not starve to death in the streets isn’t just good practically, but economically, because then you have people strong and skilled enough to work when new work they do want, does materialise.
That's a nuanced way of looking at unemployment that I’ve literally never seen in ~35 years of reading the news and almost as long reading the economic press: unemployed workers as potentially responsive opportunists, just waiting for their time to discover something new they will love. Social potential, not a problem to be stamped out.
Do you really want to starve our national social potential, just so the media classes and protestants feel like everyone is being forced to work doing shit they hate for almost no money? Thinking about this because of Labour forcing young people to work for fuck all benefits, like Tory scum.
It feels like forcing kids/YAs to work doing bullshit jobs is just eating up time they could have been spending developing businesses, even if that new business is streaming Fortnite to 200 followers, growing their Vinted, or shilling nudes for £300 a month, just because it’s not a real™ job. That’s still experimentation, still learning, still building something that might actually fit them and maybe even grow.
I suppose that Tory-lite WASPY bullshit is always going to look appealing to decision makers; especially those who have to make it look like growth is happening, when just over half that growth still goes directly to a handful of billionaires. Forcing people into any old job makes the graphs look fine while quietly starving the social potential we pretend we can’t afford to support.
