Better than a guaranteed basic income

This last weekend's (failed) referendum in Switzerland about paying inactive people for doing nothing, made me think a bit further. Once more it reminded me that unemployment is a terrible scourge that will have to be addressed by states that are typically incapable or unwilling to do anything about it.

We all know that unemployment is evil, leads to despair, crime and a cortege of social problems. I also believe that in our days, work has become a human right as well.

Now, if modern society, high productivity and automation are generating more unemployment, the State has a moral duty to offer jobs in its public sector, for useful and needed purposes, like taking care of its youth (childcare and education), its elderly, its handicapped and to create useful infrastructures while maintaining the existing ones and replacing the failing ones.

By funding these efforts with taxpayers' money, the state would offer those jobs to its able unemployed work force that, in turn, would have the option of taking them and earning a decent living, or refusing them, but die on the vine because the social “safety net” would have been removed.

Taxpayers would find value for their contributions, active people would find self-respect, be eventually able to gain skills from this temporary fix and move into more lucrative private positions. Everyone would be put to work including the lazy, that would have no other choice if they really want to survive...