Safety has degrees. In functioning economies, a competent person will pretty much never be involuntarily unemployed for more than 6 months, but the 2008 financial crisis almost got us into long-lasting economic dysfunction. That mess could have been a lot worse and lasted a lot longer, and because of the lax regulation and immense corruption (I know it's fashionable on HN to focus on a tiny corner of capitalism where people are decent and things actually work, but trust me that there's a lot of incompetence and malevolence out there) the next recession is likely to be worse. So, while 6 months of savings might be enough to handle sudden job loss in 2007 or 2011, I can't guarantee the same about, say, 2018.
Six months of savings means you're okay as long as (1) the economy doesn't utterly tank, which it almost did in 2008 and probably will do before 2020 because of the assholes running it, and (2) you don't have any major health problems. It means that as long as the option for talented people people to reliably sell labor to the market at a fair price exists, and as long as you don't develop health problems that render you unable to make this exchange (i.e. hold down a job) then you don't need to worry about events like layoffs. Fair, I'll grant you that, but there's a great deal of difference between the single-9 security offered by being smart and prudent while having an emergency fund and the triple-9 security offered by millions of dollars and elite social connections.
In functioning economies, a competent person will pretty much never be involuntarily unemployed for more than 6 months, but the 2008 financial crisis almost got us into long-lasting economic dysfunction.
By that definition, our current economy seems to be functioning quite well. There seem to be a lot of long term unemployed people, but total production/consumption/etc has pretty much recovered [1]. This strongly suggests that the people currently unemployed were not productive when they had work.
Of course, I'm assuming "competent" and "productive" are roughly the same thing. I can see reasonable distinctions to be made between them under some circumstances, e.g. a competent buggy whip maker.
By the way, if you develop health problems that render you unable to hold down any job, you are eligible for SS disability benefits. So your losses always have a lower bound.
A functioning economy doesn't just lay people off, it finds ways for them to be productive in other occupations. The point of unemployment isn't for people to sit around on their ass all day, it's so they can be freed up for work that is more valuable in the long run.
You can define the term "functioning economy" in all sorts of ways. By michaelochurch's definition ("a competent person will pretty much never be involuntarily unemployed for more than 6 months"), the US economy seems to be functioning (more or less). By your definition, it is not. There is no point in debating definitions.
However, I do find your suggestion interesting. Would a "functioning economy" (by your definition) also not discard obsolete machinery? Or does your definitiongive human labor a privileged position relative to other inputs? These are all perfectly fine things to do. Taking different definitions doesn't change the underlying reality, I'm just curious about the thought processes leading to yours.
A functioning economy rarely discards obsolete machinery - instead, it finds better uses for that machinery or its component parts. Sometimes that means melting it down all the way down to scrap metal and then recasting it as other machinery. But sometimes there's a very useful job for that machinery as-is in other markets - for example, that Caterpillar back-hoe that's 30 years old and very out of date in the U.S. may still be quite useful for a construction project in Ethiopia, because the alternative in Ethiopia is a shovel. Or that desktop workstation that's now too slow for a dot-com knowledge worker might be useful fodder for a Stanford grad student's research project in data mining the web.
Or perhaps the most striking example - gasoline was initially a "waste" product from the refinement of petroleum into kerosene. It was kerosene that people wanted, because that could function as a substitute for expensive whale oil in lamps. Well, kerosene and heavy fuel oils that could power steam turbines. It wasn't until the development of the internal combustion engine that gasoline became useful, and that engine was economically feasible largely because gasoline was a cheap waste product of a process that was already in use.
The goal of the economy at large is to take the resources we have available - land, labor, capital, natural resources, and ideas - and convert them into the things that we, as human beings, want most. In rare occasions, that means throwing it out entirely. But in most cases, there's some use for your garbage, and it's the job of the entrepreneur to figure out what that is. I can't really believe that the best use of unemployed people is to have them sitting around on the couch feeling sorry for themselves.
I think our economy has pockets of dysfunction interspersed with a few places (e.g. Silicon Valley) where it functions well. On the whole, I'd call it pretty mediocre. We've had great productivity gains since 1975, but all of the benefits have gone to 1% of the population, and only the small fraction of that 1 percent who worked directly in technology could even be argued to deserve it. Still, I'll grant you that we have a good economy; what we have as well in the U.S. is an absolutely shitty society. Far more important than whether an economy is capitalist or socialist is whether it has good people in charge, and corporatism pretty much guarantees that it won't. For whatever reason, Europeans are (now) better at making sure utterly terrible ideas (like Arizona's immigration law, private health insurance, Citizens United, Proposition 8) rarely get into implementation, and that good ones (universal healthcare, federal vacation floor, available higher education) do. I think that that's because the Europeans (and Japanese) had a front-row seat, middle of last century, for what happens when people who think like U.S. Republicans end up in power.
By the way, if you develop health problems that render you unable to hold down any job, you are eligible for SS disability benefits. So your losses always have a lower bound.
What if you develop health problems that render you unable to hold a decent job? (Then there is the problem of defining "decent", but I'm not even going there.) The worst jobs in the U.S. to not pay enough for a person to live on. Besides, for someone like an engineer to end up in retail would be such a waste of talent that he or she might as well not work.
The benefits of increased productivity have helped everyone consume more. It's only increases to CPI-adjusted income (which wildly overstates inflation http://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/boskinrpt.html ) which is concentrated at the top.
I won't address your complaints about American vs European values, or what I think (but I'm not completely sure) is an attempt to invoke Godwin's law by comparing Republicans to Nazis (or Communists?). Not sure if "middle of last century" refers to the 40's, 50's or 60's.
Six months of savings means you're okay as long as (1) the economy doesn't utterly tank, which it almost did in 2008 and probably will do before 2020 because of the assholes running it, and (2) you don't have any major health problems. It means that as long as the option for talented people people to reliably sell labor to the market at a fair price exists, and as long as you don't develop health problems that render you unable to make this exchange (i.e. hold down a job) then you don't need to worry about events like layoffs. Fair, I'll grant you that, but there's a great deal of difference between the single-9 security offered by being smart and prudent while having an emergency fund and the triple-9 security offered by millions of dollars and elite social connections.