Solves democracy

Minsky believed a job guarantee would be supportive of democracy because all members of society profit from reduced unemployment and the socially useful output the program would produce. He did not spend much time thinking about democratic processes within the program. To fill this gap, Pavlina Tcherneva (2020, 88) proposes a participatory democracy approach with a bottom-up design, “[…] encouraging direct input from citizens, community members, and other stakeholders representing the public interest in the proposal, management, and execution of the project. […] Because the job guarantee program encourages citizen input, puts pressure on punitive private sector labor practices, and invests in the public good, it can be an institution with profound democratizing tendencies, functioning as a conduit for transformative change in the workplace, in people’s everyday lives, and in the economy as a whole.” Combining the job guarantee with a democratic and decentralized bottom-up approach also tackles the issue of how to provide enough jobs in an economic downturn. Local communities and citizens provide suggestions regarding urgent, ongoing, and nice-to-have projects, and many existing local projects and initiatives could easily be scaled up.