This problem seems at the crux of an even larger problem. Classic economic theories deal with the notion that a person relates primarily to his/her society through employment. The employment model of civil participation has lost its relevance. What we really have always needed is democracy even in the realm of the economy.
What the neoliberals want to do is to separate the economy completely from society. What the economic historian Karl Polanyi called the disembedment of the economy.
They are extremely duplicitous about what they say that they are trying to achieve and what they actually want. They don't want the government out of the economy, they want control of the government so that they can use the power of the government to bend the economy to increase profits and the incomes of the already rich. Which they have been doing since 1980, but with the interruptions of the Clinton and the Obama administrations, because both raised taxes on the rich.
I was raised in a family that had been rich, but that had lost its wealth when the Japanese invaded China. I also attended private schools on scholarship with the children of the rich. So I was raised with all of the attitudes of the rich without any of the money. The children of the wealthy are raised with two principles solidly implanted in them. One is to preserve the capital. Two is that only the rich can be trusted with the nation's wealth. That the non-wealthy just waste their money on consumption, but the wealthy invest their money.
Neoliberalism is at its very core is nothing more than applying these principles to the whole economy.
The employment model of citizen relationship to the economy and one's society has some deep flaws. For one, it actually withholds full status as a citizen from those who are unemployed whether they choose to be unemployed or not. They get less and less from society to attach them to society and often life itself.
I believe that the economy should be concerned with providing a job to everyone who is willing to work and to making sure that no one who works full time has to live in poverty.
That it is not the place of the government to make sure that the wealthy get an ever increasing piece of the pie. This is what the neoliberals want, to make sure that an ever increasing amount of the surplus created by the economy goes to the already rich. Government policies do determine the distribution of the nation's income. They should use this power to increase wages, demand, investment and growth in the economy.
The goal of a government should therefore be more than just making everybody have a job and denying the necessities of life from people if they have not earned enough to pay for them.
The neoliberal economists are constantly floating the idea that all unemployment is voluntary. That the unemployed could easily get a job if they wanted to by working for a lower wage than they were earning before they were laid off.
The neoliberals, like their template predecessors the classical liberals of the 19th century, want everything to be a market. That there should be a so called pseudo market for labor, were everyone who wants a job can obtain a job by lowering their wage demands. That employers will hire more people if they cost less, taking care of the unemployment problem.
I personally have hired and fired thousands of people, I was in industrial construction. I can truly say that I never hired more people than the number that I needed to do the work that I had to do. That I never hired more people than I needed just because they were asking for lower wages.
According to the neoliberals there should also be be pseudo markets for land and money. Neither of these are anymore suitable for a pseudo market than labor is. Land is nature. It is simply wrong to treat human beings and nature, the environment, as commodities whose price, value, is determined entirely by the market. Not only is it impossible to reconcile the value that we place on human beings and on nature and the environment with the subordination of labor and land to the commercial markets, it is something that has always been resisted by the members of society to point that it has always doomed even small steps toward pseudo markets and the self-regulating market.
Money has to be controlled by a third party, usually a central bank, to prevent the excesses of deflation and high inflation. Experience has taught us that people place the preservation of the principle above the returns, which seriously impedes the operation of a money pseudo market.
Automation in conjunction with the employment model of human society disengages progressively larger and larger portions of society from participation and even loyalty to society. Democracy in the workplace is the only way to reconstitute a system of production that finds a useful engagement for society as a whole and the individual. The goal has to be no profit by some artificial calculation but instead engagement of all of society. Workers must feel they are a part of the organization and that they are not endangered by the failure of bosses to find a use for them. Without a firm recognition of the humanity of the worker, the worker's position and also one's status as a member of society is precarious and at the whim of non participating investors and their surrogates.
Your "employment model of human society" is in terms of economics the subordination of society to the self-regulating market. The neoliberals want to run society for the benefit of the economy instead of running the economy for the benefit of society. Even if the Utopian self-regulating free market was possible, this alone would be reason enough not to pursue it. And there is no support in either history or theory to believe that it is possible.
The way that we should handle the losses in jobs to higher productivity, to automation, is rather straightforward and simple. We need to increase the wages of the lower 50% of the workers. And it is a way that neoliberals have to admit will work. We simply do the opposite of what they did to suppress wages. We raise the minimum wage. We support the unions instead of discourage them, we discourage globalization and capital flight, etc.
I promote the idea that the corporations should be able to own themselves and to be free of the current falsehood that the shareholders are the owners of the corporation, the main stakeholders in the corporation and that the sole job of the corporation is to make profits for the shareholders.
The corporations should have as their main obligations to be responsible to their employees, their customers and to society. The shareholders don't have any loyalty to the corporations. As my CEO inelegantly explained to me our majority shareholder could dump our stock while sitting on the toilet during their morning shit because of an article that they read in the Wall fucking Street Journal.
Stock in a corporation should only have a claim on part of the corporation's profits for a fixed time after it is issued, say ten years, and that after that period the stock turns into a non-leveraged derivative that pays out depending on the success of the corporation. That the profits of the company aren't taxed if they are reinvested in the corporation or if they are distributed to the employees.
