Steve Keen might suggest you add Australia to your list and, of course, the USA, where home ownership was highly touted by Bush 43 in addition to verbal encouragement, prolonged low interest rates and regulatory forbearance courtesy of Greenspan and the Fed. I suppose a Job Guarantee might be a substitute when the former efforts have blown up spectacularly, as in the USA but at the cost of doing great violence to the simplistic moral economic tale that has so thoroughly been sold to the public.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

"[Australian] government policy is to have expensive affordable housing. Which is rather difficult to achieve."

- Keen

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

However in the JG policy, the provider of employment insurance does not bid against private employers for labor, but rather sets a price floor and gives way to anyone willing to outbid in wage or conditions.

It seems as if part of the premise is that if the political terrain in a country with employment insurance was the same as the neoliberal "do what we say or starve" countries, then any additional income will be scooped up by rentier and all that the employment insurance will do is to redistribute income among the relatively powerles middle income classes and working poor.

However, getting a Job Guarantee put into place seems like it first requires changing that political terrain, and having a Job Guarantee in place would seem to undermine much of the neoliberal disciplinary stick.

So I'm not clear on how the argument by which the income is soaked up by rentier is consistent with the premise that a Job Guarantee has been successfully put into place.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.