Your statement makes no sense. The incentive for the wealthy to pay to have work done is that people don’t do work unless they get paid for it.
We’d have better luck building more houses.
That is a straw man argument. I don’t know anyone who sincerely thinks we don’t need investment capital (except maybe communists, but even they want it they just want the public sector in charge of it).
Without demand for what ‘Joe six pack’ is making where is his job? I used to work at a company that made items for upper middle class consumers. They were luxury items. When the recession hit production was cut in half because demand dropped. Now a lot of jobs have been cut.
If Joe isn’t earning a living wage, nobody can buy what he has. Maybe the US will convert to a plutonomy where the rich own everything but they also make up the bulk of consumption, but how long will people tolerate riding the bus and avoiding medical care so they can go to their job waxing yachts all day? They tried that in Latin America (the economy grew but only the wealthy benefitted), it led to the pink tide revolution of socialists being elected to government office. In the US the wealthy have an effective media outlet (fox, WSJ, etc) to convince working people to laud the rich and hate the poor, but that doesn’t really work on the new generation of voters from what I’ve seen. That is more for boomers still stuck in culture wars, and they are dying off and being replaced by millennials.
When people complain about the rich they mostly complain about how 90%+ of all GDP growth goes to them, and how they use their influence to corrupt our political system and dialogue (by buying media outlets, etc). I don’t think many people hate the rich just for being wealthy.
I think he is talking about the need for alternative methods of wealth distribution(as opposed to wage earning) as being necessary for more widespread prosperity. We already have many blatant(food stamps, welfare, UI benefits, Soc Sec) and some not so blatant(cush govt. contracts and jobs in which employment is not based on strict productivity or profit analysis) non-wage forms of redistribution, but perhaps we are reaching a point where this type of distribution needs to be more prominent in the economy. I don’t necessarily agree with this, I’ll have to ask my economist friends.
Personally I think the key to long term material comfort to average people(of which I am one - on a good day) is reduction on household expense(ditch the car, live tiny etc.)YMMV
I wouldn’t consider Bob McTeer an average joe, but YMMV.
The answer to create more jobs is simple in concept but very difficult to accept politically. That is you lower the cost of an hour of work. I do not mean the wages paid, but the “labor burden” of employing someone.
“Labor burden” is defined as “the actual cost of a company to have an employee, aside from the salary the employee earns.”
When I started work in the construction industry years ago out of college the labor burden I was told to carry was 27.5%. Now at the same company it is a few decimal points above 40%. This is in basically a rural state. I am sure is much higher in urban area’s.
Get that down to 30-35% and employment will respond. Not the entire answer but a big part of it I suspect.
If you are the only person who does this, you benefit and no one loses very much. If everyone does it consumption and thus employment plummets, and you might find that you can’t afford even your reduced lifestyle.
If everyone consumed like I do, we’d be screwed.
More jobs? 
Lots of jobs are going unfilled here in the U.S. Job fairs are constantly being held around where I live.
Part of the reason is due to the generosity of our entitlement programs. Why work when someone is paying you not to work? Employers are competing with welfare and SSDI benefits.
People don’t want jobs; they want handouts. Politicians figured this out many years ago.
Employers who pay at least $15 and hour with full benefits never seem to have those kinds of staffing problems, not even in expensive areas.
Remember the '90s? When salaries rose to decent levels, and there was full employment? How come all these freeloaders wanted jobs then?
If employers really were short on labor, they’d give the people they hire 40 hours a week instead of just enough not to get benefits, wouldn’t they?
I only avocate it for average and below average people; By average I mean bottom 80% of socioeconomic ladder. Pretty much anyone not in the top 20% at least has little hope of any real financial security while continuing consuming at the levels they are. It boggles my mind how some people live. Everyone else should keep spending as usual; the market will adapt to the new equilibrium.
I understand, but I know people in the top 20% who are broke because they consume way too much. Didn’t Dr. Johnson say that the person who spends a penny more than his income is miserable while the person who spends a penny less is happy for the rest of his days? (Quoted from poor memory.)
It is easier for those of us in the top 20% to follow your advice since necessities don’t consume as much of our income. The real solution is more jobs and more income so fewer people have to live on the edge.
Samuel Johnson? I like that quote - I never heard it before, he was a favorite author of mine when young. I agree more income and better jobs would be a good solution, but I think ultimately a paradigm change in patterns of consumption effected by new technology and sociological changes in norms and mores will, realistically, be the only thing which will allow the average person to return to a level of material comfort not seen for the last 30 years in the U.S. We are starting to see some of those changes now, but I could be wrong about it all.
There certainly are different methods of wealth distribution besides free market exchanges. Rationing, lottery, first come/first serve just off the top of my head.
The trick is linking wealth distribution to wealth creation. That wealth is still created by someone. Whether it’s building homes, clothes, iPods or even just tending to the machines that actually build that stuff, people tend to want to be compensated for their time.