I now think that the ultimate “rising tide that lifts all boats” is availability of jobs. The labor market should be a seller’s market. Everything else, including housing / education / healthcare, follows from that. (Sorry Georgists, it’s not land but labor which is key.) But the elite is a net buyer of labor, so it prefers keeping labor cheap. When Marx called unemployed people a “reserve army of labor”, whose plight scares everyone else into working for cheap, he was right. And from my own experience, having lived in a time and place where you could find a job in a day, I’m convinced that it’s the right way for a society to be. It creates a general sense of well-being and rightness, in a way that welfare programs can’t.
So the problem is twofold: 1) which policies would shift the labor market balance very strongly toward job seekers, 2) why the elite would implement such policies. If you have a democracy, you at least nominally have a solution to (2). But first you need to figure out (1).
I now think that the ultimate “rising tide that lifts all boats” is availability of jobs. The labor market should be a seller’s market. Everything else, including housing / education / healthcare, follows from that. (Sorry Georgists, it’s not land but labor which is key.) But the elite is a net buyer of labor, so it prefers keeping labor cheap. When Marx called unemployed people a “reserve army of labor”, whose plight scares everyone else into working for cheap, he was right. And from my own experience, having lived in a time and place where you could find a job in a day, I’m convinced that it’s the right way for a society to be. It creates a general sense of well-being and rightness, in a way that welfare programs can’t.
So the problem is twofold: 1) which policies would shift the labor market balance very strongly toward job seekers, 2) why the elite would implement such policies. If you have a democracy, you at least nominally have a solution to (2). But first you need to figure out (1).