>This is an overly coarse grained depiction of the situation. An individual is not blanket "bad employee" who can't be productive. I'm a good software developer

>This is an overly coarse grained depiction of the situation. An individual is not blanket "bad employee" who can't be productive. I'm a good software developer, but if you hired me to be a concert pianist I'd suck at it. I'd say probably 5-10% of employees end up being under productive or non-productive at their jobs. This is consistent with the performance review scores I've seen. I explicitly defined 'bad employee' as 'takes many job hops to find a place'. It's coarse grained to make a point, which you perhaps missed. My point is: There is a % of the workforce that could work, but it is economically more efficient for them not to. > When firing an employee is easy, employers are much more willing to hire because they know that they will be able to terminate employees that are not productive. This is a separate idea: The job market should be such that people are free to find the best place for them. It'd take multiple essays to cover all the angles on how to best do that, or why the US is as it is, etc. For example, different cultural standards play quite a role there. > This doesn't seem to be the case seeing as how most of Western Europe has a higher unemployment rate than the US. It is the case now. Check just about any european politician's speeches. Unemployment rates don't prove anything here. > You're seriously saying that if we don't employ people who are incapable of doing their jobs, then the only other option is summary execution? Not what I said. I said: If you want to make an economic argument, given the fact that there are a few people where it's economically more efficient to not employ them, one should accept this. Or take on ridiculous extremist positions such as summary execution, which I assume nobody wants to take. > 0% unemployment is a crazy goal and I don't know why you seem to think that making it harder or easier to fire employees You seemed to be making the point that gig economy jobs are a good solution for perennially bad employees because they can easily get these jobs and be easily fired from them. I was countering said point.