Domestic servant subsidies?

Through a friend of mine, I got along this post by an excellent economy blogger Philkingtonphil. In his post he great an idea by John Carney to introduce domestic servant subsidies. Usually I tend to agree with Philkingtonphil on most topics, but on this one I heavily disagree with him.

The core of the issue is the introduction of a job guarantee program, a system in which the government will employ people in times of high unemployment. Such policies are usually proposed by left-wing economists and supported by left-wing politicians. Conservatives usually tend to oppose such measures. Well mostly, John Carney is a conservative. But his proposal is slightly different from job guarantee proposals from the left. Instead of creating a new government organization which employs people, Carney wants to create subsidies for people to hire domestic servants.

Basically Philkingtonphil rejects this idea because John Carney is a selfish conservative, I will leave this classification to him. But further I see no reason why Carney's proposal should rejected out of hand. And Philkingtonphil's remark that you could replace "domestic servant" with "sex worker" or "pornographer" in Carney's text, is to me just a game of words and not a substantial argument.

Only his remark that a society could do better than offer just jobs as domestic servants to its unemployed, is something I could agree with. But does not prove that Carney's proposal is wrong. We could establish a system in which domestic servants subsidies with other employment subsidies. This would offer a choice among jobs to the unemployed.

Personally I think that a domestic servant subsidy would be a good idea. Though I would design the system differently than Carney did. Rather than giving people a tax break, I would let the government pay the salary of the people employed in this manner. As a georgist I am opposed to income taxes, so a break on that type of taxation would be impossible.

Many middle class families can use domestic services very well, but most middle class families cannot afford to hire domestic workers. Further domestic work is suitable for unskilled or low skilled people such as high school (or even college) drop outs.

Is domestic work actually bad? Many high school and college students do work as waiters or dish washers in restaurants, bars and businesses like that. Domestic service is not much different from that work.

And if I might speak for myself, I would seriously consider to be a domestic servant if I would be 18 again. I seriously believe that young people, especially young males, would gain much from the experience as a domestic servant. In particular they would get disciplined, which would help them with getting their own lives on track.