Job Lock

During the course of discussing Health Care reform, Ezra Klein took up Job Lock, where an employee stays with a firm longer than they would because of health care coverage and that this is a bad thing. Among other things, he cites an MIT report that found that "studies find that mobility is much higher when workers do not have to fear losing coverage; job-to-job mobility is estimated to increase by as much as 25 percent when alternative group coverage is available."

To restate, health care requirements, such as persistent illnesses or existing conditions, or caution in the face of possible health care requirements causes employees to stay in jobs where they might otherwise leave for better positions or follow their own entrepreneurial instinct into business for themselves. Let's suppose this is a fact. On the one hand, those who would leave for better positions are not really relevant to our capitalist scheme, of course, because they're still operating in the finite world. There might be more movement in the confined capitalism of already existing companies, the corollary for the corporation now free to fire employees without causing unproductive fear of disease (assuming of course an economic reason for all capitalist behavior; it's entirely possible I suppose that a business wouldn't fire an employee who is just underperforming because they have several children or a sick spouse or something, but it should be obvious that these behaviors are not enough to produce systematic results), a shuffling of actors into slightly better positions. But this gain should be relatively minimal because in both cases, the subject who remains is relatively economcially satisfied, even if much of that satisfaction comes from the health care itself. The real advantage is going to be in, as Klein points out, the entrepreneurs who would be able to escape their subservience and produce the small-business engines for the economy.

The problem with this analysis is that it holds health coverage as an external payment beyond the natural wage relationship. It is the second part of this formula which is incorrect; wages themselves enact the same behaviors in subjects who receive them; the macroeconomic cost is employees remaining in locations which stifle their ability to contribute fully to the economy, not the mechanism by which they are trapped. To paraphrase Anthony Weiner's proposals, we might suggest a Social Security for Everyone or Unemployment for All Time, a base salary adjusted to relative income production which frees our brilliant entrepreneurs from their slavery under the thumbs of existing capitalists. Why am I tied to this shitty company, just because they pay me the money I need to buy food?

Ah! You might scream. You might suggest that there are some more capitalist forms this payout could take, something like seed money for everyone, but this is too punctuated I think. Suppose my business fails, even after the seed money, because I am not willing to risk my future earnings on this venture. Ah! You might scream, this disincentivises work, because my basic needs are simply taken care of! Of course this is true, but we need to see this instead as a certain level of necessary disincentivisation. For instance, you have huge incentives if you're starving but if we care about the quality of work, you're terrible. We disincentivise all the time in order to reframe the boundaries of the plausible work and cause different effects. What I'm proposing then, is if we are willing to shift toward this particular form of disincentivisation ostensibly to promote entrepreneurial investment, we should look at the entire economic regime and move more decisively in that direction.