Doesn’t mean anything about the specific programs the government should undertake
JW Mason 17, Associate Professor of Economics at John Jay College, City University of New York, Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, PhD in Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Comment on his own website on the article “Posts in Three Lines,” 7/27/17, https://jwmason.org/slackwire/posts-in-three-lines-5/
To reiterate my earlier answer: To me, the formal “right to an education” is almost meaningless in the abstract. Maybe it is satisfied by a library card? The important thing is that the government operates a system of public schools, staffed by public employees, which are open to all children, located throughout the country, funded through certain (not always adequate) defined sources, covering a certain curriculum, with certain definite resources, etc. None of this stuff is inherent in the abstract existence of a “right to education.” In the same way, I don’t think that the notion of a job guarantee tells us anything about what concrete programs we’d like the government to undertake. At one extreme, if we literally mean that anyone who performs any work of any kind should receive a living wage, that’s just a universal basic income. At the other extreme, if we mean that anyone willing and able to perform the specific tasks the government happens to be hiring for should get a living wage, that’s the situation that already exists. I don’t think the term “job guarantee” tells us anything at all about where on that continuum we are actually trying to get to.