Questions to which the answer is no

Unemployment is of course a problem, there's those vague whispers of technological unemployment coming down the pike, so, what should we be doing about it?

Should the Government Guarantee Everyone a Job?

No. That's one of those questions where it's entirely and quite clear that the answer is no.

As to why it's no it's because it's a solution that's at least a century, if not near a millennia, out of date as an answer to the problem.

One way of detailing the problem is OK, so government guarantees a job for everyone. Which job?

Back when work was, to a large extent, the application of human muscle power to either farm work or some form of building (roads, canals, buildings, sea defences, whatever) then labour was homogeneous. Someone who could guide a plough might not be quite capable of surveying a dyke, for example, but they'd be perfectly, reasonably at least, efficient at doing the spade work to build one. Thus the various make work schemes in times of dearth familiar to the varied Chinese and Indian administrations of the past were sensible reactions to dearth.

The 1930s experience in the US, well, still, building a dam did need tens of thousands equipped with little more than a shovel and wheelbarrow.

But today we just don't have homgeneous labour. It's hugely, highly, heterogeneous. This is, of course, just the side effect of that much greater division and specialisation of labour which makes the modern world so rich. But it does mean that there isn't anything that we do which either requires or benefits from the mobilisation of large amounts of untrained, in this task, labour.

Well, perhaps government could work out what needs to be done, then train people to do it and that's how we'll provide everyone with a job? But that runs straight into Hayek, pointing out that the market is the only method we've actually got of processing through the information to work out what needs to be done and in what manner. We know very well that government trying to decide that is going to be less efficient than just leaving well alone.

And as a final kick in the fork for the argument that we can just move labour from one task to another at will. If we could do that then there would be no such thing as technological unemployment, for labour could be moved from one task to another at will.