By admin

By Lew Jeppson,

In a op-ed reprinted in the Deseret News, economist Robert Samuelson makes a startling admission: we don’t know what to do about the long term unemployed!

Says Samuleson: “Long-term unemployment is a huge national and personal tragedy. It’s an idleness trap. We don’t know how to solve it; but we can at least not make it worse.”

This is a very frank admission that capitalism has failed, utterly failed, labor.

What do we say? A socialist president and congress would put the long term unemployed to work, doing what they already know how to do if possible, retraining them if necessary. But government would be the employer of last resort. And there are plenty of potential projects to soak up the idle labor, with our rotting transportation infrastructures for just one example.

In the meantime this is a tragedy, a permanent one for many. While a tiny percentage continue to command a greater portion of the world’s wealth, the rest of us fall further and further behind. Capitalism’s promise of raising everyone’s well-being is belied by the continuous theft of wealth by the rich.

Lastly, we socialists need to make it completely clear, we understand that people NEED to work. Not being able to work destroys human beings.

Source: Long-term unemployment and the failure of capitalism