The core problem is that people think that "jobs" are good. Jobs are terrible. Productivity, health, education, these are the things we want, if you really just want jobs take every unemployed person and give them instructions to walk around a football field all day for minimum wage.
You need some mechanism of getting money into everyone's hands, since everyone needs to spend money on food/housing/etc. The market has demonstrated it isn't up to the task. Either 1) we let poor people starve, 2) we give them money, or 3) we make work for them. I like #2 (basic income). The people I meet outside of the tech bubble tend to like #1 or #3. Which camp are you in?
I think that poor people starve because the powerful keep them from living freely. Every person should have the right to set up a farm on unused land, but this gets complex in a modern society.
Therefore I subscribe to geolibertarianism. Use land taxes to implement a basic income.
But let's not spread lies about how we need jobs. We don't. We need houses, and food, and comfort.
The fact that we need some mechanism doesn't mean that any mechanism that "just works" is justifiable.
The problem is more at the root, and it's in the fact that the political system in (ahem) some countries is creating a perverse social and occupational structure.
With a certain amount of money, we can have the following system (in simplified version):
- person 1 builds a jail
- person 2 arrests people 3,4 and 5, for possibly trivial reasons
- person 6 mantains #3,4,5 in the jail, for an excessive amount of time
Or this alternative:
- person 2,6 teach primary and seconday education
- person 3,4,5 get a sufficient education and have an adequate blue collar life, maybe even white collar
- person 1 gets chained at the bottom of the ocean for attempting to corrupt the political system
The problem is that when in a society, crime becomes a business, the first case is what you get.
There are quite a lot of infrastructure upgrades to be made. Laying fiber to every home in America, for example, or a functional high speed rail system (or better yet, a vac train network). We're far from running out of work to be done. We're not exactly at the complete make-work stage yet.
