Forum Post: A new Social Contract
Posted 13 years ago on Nov. 2, 2011, 10:33 a.m. EST by EdmondSeymore
(101)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
By agreeing to abide by the rule of law, each person is giving up some freedom of action.
In return, society owes the individual justice. The expectations are set in the Constitution as follows: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
In addition, I propose that the right to a job needs to be added as an obligation of society.
And, that the individual shall be required to purchase insurance against risks rather than rely on society to protect the individual from loss.
Full employment
Full employment means that anyone who wants work will find it in a short time frame - say one week.
We have the Virginia Employment Commission (VEC) here. Their job is to help people find work. If anyone not able to find a job on their own goes to the VEC they should get a job quickly. If none are available, then the person would be given a temporary job doing non-essential work such as entering data into a computer data base for historical material not already available for online access or doing recycling of material not normally recycled or some other useful but non-essential activity.
The idea about providing full employment, is to always have something productive to use labor for when market demand is not providing full employment. We should not pay people to do nothing (at least not in the long term). Therefore, rather than pay welfare, we should pay people who cannot find employment to do something which is socially useful. The increased expenses would not be born by the recycling companies; but, by society from a national sales tax or a progressive income tax on individuals.
For chronic unemployment, we need to use the government to create more jobs by hiring companies to provide products and services which promote the social good. Such as, performing research or hiring more teachers, to soak up human capacity which the private sector is not capable of using.
Bottom Line: When the free market is not providing sufficient jobs, the government must step in to provide work which does not compete with businesses which are profitable.
Ref: http://www.kwbsolutions.com/TCV/SFE1.htm
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