In the infinitely big private sector where everyone can get a job except all those you are just forcing to work for the state?
If the state needs someone who is unemployed to work for it, it should give her a contract and pay her a wage. You can’t make someone who receives welfare benefits work more than those benefits are worth anyway. That would obviously be unjust.
It’s also obvious why it is a big advantage for the state to be able to pick and chose just like the private sector instead of getting random unemployed delivered to its doorstep. There are precious few jobs were no qualifications and no training is needed. It’s also pretty unlikely that there just happens to be the right person with just the right skills around (and if it is I’m not exactly sure why the state shouldn’t hire that person instead of forcing it to work for it).
The state would have to pay for training and enforcement, there would be additional unemployed (those the state just fired and replaced with unemployed) who would also receive welfare benefits, you can’t make them work more than they receive – besides being morally questionable there is no way for the state to save any money with this scheme.
If you want truly just welfare you should advocate some sort of basic income – a fixed amount of money everyone (no matter how rich or poor) unconditionally receives from the cradle to the grave.
> If the state needs someone who is unemployed to work for it, it should give her a contract and pay her a wage. You can’t make someone who receives welfare benefits work more than those benefits are worth anyway. That would obviously be unjust.
Unjust?
Why should taxpayers pay to have someone do nothing?
That person is consuming resources produced by other people.
> I’m not exactly sure why the state shouldn’t hire that person instead of forcing it to work for it.
There's no force. If said person can get a better deal than a dole check in return for picking up trash, said person is free to take it.
So you want to abolish welfare and instead establish a working program were people are paid substantially less than minimum wage? Well, nothing wrong with that, I just don’t think it would work very well.
On your last point, it would be cheaper to give every man, woman and child in the UK GBP 3k/year no questions asked, no strings attached than to operate our present system.
I agree entirely with your last point, but if the unemployed/unemployable are not finding work in the private sector and are thus doing public works, displacing the current public employees into the private sector seems unlikely to result in them being fully employed/employable as well, right? It's not like the job-for-life public sector folk are the cream of the crop, in aggregate.
