It carries major risks – lack of productivity and trapping those with government jobs

But the job guarantee also carries major risks, and it would be a mistake to ignore these. It’s never fun to explore the pitfalls of a policy that has great potential to reduce suffering and provide dignity to so many. But this is a necessary task because properly implementing the program requires knowing the ways it might go wrong, and because a backup plan might be needed in case the job guarantee doesn’t work out as expected.

The first potential drawback would be if a job guarantee lowers productivity. If people shift out of productive private-sector jobs into government jobs that generate only half as much real value, the productivity of the nation will go down.

More worrying, a job guarantee could end up hurting the people who take government jobs. If government-provided jobs don’t successfully build the skills and work ethic people need to succeed in the private sector, and if private-sector employers shun workers who have government jobs on their resume, workers could be trapped in government jobs forever (or until the job guarantee gets repealed). If government jobs are a dead end, of course, people may shun them in the first place. But some might switch from private-sector to government jobs out of short-sightedness, not realizing that this would hurt their career.

The worst scenario is if both of these things happen at once. If each time there’s a recession or some local layoffs, government immediately snaps up the unemployed workers, more and more could get trapped in dead-end jobs, sending national productivity lower and lower every year. Eventually this could result in something not unlike a caricature of a communist country, where millions of laborers toil away at useless tasks while the country becomes steadily poorer.