Short version: how about we just literally give everyone a job that needs one? Long version: As Hyman Minsky* points out, financial capitalism is inherently u

Short version: how about we just literally give everyone a job that needs one? Long version: As Hyman Minsky* points out, financial capitalism is inherently unstable, in the sense of having perturbations that are big enough and frequent enough to transform the lives of individual human beings. Our impending wave of automation is one of those perturbations. We're probably not going to get rid of capitalism anytime soon, and even if we did that through violent revolution, the resulting perturbations would almost certainly be worse. So we've got to adjust what we've got. Plus, capitalism does have some good features. We could literally ban robots from taking some kinds of jobs, but that's a temporary fix, and do we honestly want people driving trucks all night, hopped up on drugs, in order to feed their family that they never see? We should get rid of shitty jobs where we can. I'm not sold on universal basic income. It's really expensive, and it eliminates one of the best features of capitalism, which is working for your money. Working for your money gives people meaning, purpose, and a network of human relationships, which help promote a healthy society where people feel valuable and valued. So how about this: universal basic employment. The government literally guarantees everybody a job. At a living wage, for a reasonable time commitment (less than 40 hours a week, I hope). As the capitalistic side of the economy shrinks, government automatically creates jobs to pick up the slack. Capitalism coupled to an adaptive socialist job-creation program. BUT WAIT, you scream, THAT WILL JUST EXPAND FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY AND EVERYONE WILL END UP EMPLOYED IN A SOCIALIST HELL! Devil, details. I would argue that a related deep issue in American society is the breakdown of our local communities. So let's kill two birds with one stone: build an adaptive hierarchy of taxpayer-funded job creation driven from the bottom up. Local councils meet with their neighbors, figure out the kinds of things that need to be done, built, whatever in their communities, match their needs with the local unemployed talent pool. Counties monitor the local needs. States monitor the county needs. And the feds feed money as needed and operate with a light touch. All these local community jobs pay the same, and it's a living wage. This serves as a soft wage floor in place of a hard minimum wage. It's a bit like an Americorps that pays enough to support you and your family, all the time, for anyone that needs a job. It has a lot of features of the New Deal, actually. * Underappreciated economist, newly resurgent since the 2008 financial crisis. If you took some economics classes in college, you should be able to understand his writing, but he's not a great writer. I'm just barely getting familiar with standard economic terminology, so his stuff has been a really hard slog.