Stewart BrAInfarts

John Stewart got the Ai productivity story wrong on The Daily Show .

Some of the Ai bros get it half-right, but none of them understand the unemployment story. It is not about productivity.

John Stewart = Cruel to Dogs

Both the Ai bros and Stewart were wrong — here is the biggest lie though @12:30 —“upskill”, “retrain”,…. This misses the point entirely. Retrain for what? All of you, all of you need to know the source of unemployment. Then you can know how to eliminate unemployment. The source of all unemployment (defined as people seeking to exchange their labour for the currency) is the government failing to hire all the unemployed Its tax liabilities by design generated. The purpose of tax is to create people needing the state currency — but for the purpose of hiring them in the public sector. Understand this and “upskilling” or “retraining” is not the answer, the answer is the government just hires anyone who is willing to work for public purpose who cannot find employment in the private sector.

Governments can always hire anyone who is unemployed, since (a) government issues the currency by fiat and does not get it off the tax payer, it’s the other way around, tax payers get currency off the government net spending (or bank credit). (b) the private sector bid for unemployed labour is zero, so this is not an inflationary pressure.

The private sector role is to produce real output with as few workers as possible, to free people to work for public purpose. We call this expanding the public sector, and should be in combination with a wage floor or Job Guarantee policy. No government is running a JG. They all could though. It is a policy choice. They don’t because they do not understand the purpose of taxation.

Taxation is not a funding operation, it is an unemployment operation but by design, to create people willing to work in the public sector. So you hire them, All of them. For people who cannot or should not be working the government provides Basic Income Guarantee (pensions, childcare, welfare).

The way governments currently use the tax system is cruel and does not fit broad public purpose. It’s the cruel “Dog & Bone” story: They are taxing one hundred Dogs 100 bones (issuing 100B in tax liabilities let’s say), but only issuing 90 bones (spending only 90B). The result is the entire economy is in default because governments are not hiring and spending enough, or fail to lower the tax liability (one or the other or both). It’s even worse if a few elite Dogs (the Top Ten Percent) save a few billion a year, then there are even fewer “bones” for the rest who we call “unemployed in bones” (aka. unemployed in tax credits).

If you upskill and retrain the 10 Dogs who could not find bones, they might become expert bone finders, but next year all that’ll happen is a different 10 Dogs will come home boneless. You cannot solve unemployment using upskilling. You can only eliminate unemployment by hiring the unemployed — why not hire for public purpose? The skill level does not matter. The purpose matters.