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One of the hardest things you can possibly do in this country is enact a change that will lead to fewer jobs. Prosecutors, police, and various administrative s

One of the hardest things you can possibly do in this country is enact a change that will lead to fewer jobs. Prosecutors, police, and various administrative staff would suddenly have little to do and would need to be cut from payrolls. As much as I would like it for our country to put a sense of justice ahead of "jobs", it's not going to happen.

dlss 12y ago
As a taxpayer, if that's really the problem I'd rather just pay those cops, prosecutors, jail staff etc to sit around. Maybe the extra man power could be funneled toward preventing real crime (murder, rape, fraud, etc), or maybe it does nothing. Getting nothing for that money is still better than paying them to make the world worse.
3pt14159 12y ago
The core problem is that people think that "jobs" are good. Jobs are terrible. Productivity, health, education, these are the things we want, if you really just want jobs take every unemployed person and give them instructions to walk around a football field all day for minimum wage.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  You need some mechanism of getting money into everyone's hands, since everyone needs to spend money on food/housing/etc. The market has demonstrated it isn't up to the task. Either 1) we let poor people starve, 2) we give them money, or 3) we make work for them. I like #2 (basic income). The people I meet outside of the tech bubble tend to like #1 or #3. Which camp are you in?
  - ericd 12y ago
    There are quite a lot of infrastructure upgrades to be made. Laying fiber to every home in America, for example, or a functional high speed rail system (or better yet, a vac train network). We're far from running out of work to be done. We're not exactly at the complete make-work stage yet.
  - 3pt14159 12y ago
    I think that poor people starve because the powerful keep them from living freely. Every person should have the right to set up a farm on unused land, but this gets complex in a modern society. Therefore I subscribe to geolibertarianism. Use land taxes to implement a basic income. But let's not spread lies about how we need jobs. We don't. We need houses, and food, and comfort.
    - Datsundere 12y ago
      Nobody wants to farm in this day and age.
      - rch 12y ago
        Drop by Boulder sometime...
    - mikeash 12y ago
      Who decides what land is unused?
  - pizza234 12y ago
    The fact that we need some mechanism doesn't mean that any mechanism that "just works" is justifiable. The problem is more at the root, and it's in the fact that the political system in (ahem) some countries is creating a perverse social and occupational structure. With a certain amount of money, we can have the following system (in simplified version): - person 1 builds a jail - person 2 arrests people 3,4 and 5, for possibly trivial reasons - person 6 mantains #3,4,5 in the jail, for an excessive amount of time Or this alternative: - person 2,6 teach primary and seconday education - person 3,4,5 get a sufficient education and have an adequate blue collar life, maybe even white collar - person 1 gets chained at the bottom of the ocean for attempting to corrupt the political system The problem is that when in a society, crime becomes a business, the first case is what you get.
grimtrigger 12y ago
I've never heard this argument being made. The more common charge is that those who roll back the security apparatus are "soft on crime"
rch 12y ago
This is wrong It can absolutely happen, and does fairly often. I know plenty of people in research and academia who have been affected by cutbacks. Maybe we should be spreading those cost saving efforts around more than we are currently.
- jcromartie 12y ago
  Maybe I should be more specific: It's hard to cut "real" jobs. Academics and research are "out of touch" with "regular folks". At least that's how populist politicians put it. sigh I really look forward to a science/research-based economy.

dlss 12y ago

As a taxpayer, if that's really the problem I'd rather just pay those cops, prosecutors, jail staff etc to sit around. Maybe the extra man power could be funneled toward preventing real crime (murder, rape, fraud, etc), or maybe it does nothing. Getting nothing for that money is still better than paying them to make the world worse.

3pt14159 12y ago

The core problem is that people think that "jobs" are good. Jobs are terrible. Productivity, health, education, these are the things we want, if you really just want jobs take every unemployed person and give them instructions to walk around a football field all day for minimum wage.

jjoonathan 12y ago
You need some mechanism of getting money into everyone's hands, since everyone needs to spend money on food/housing/etc. The market has demonstrated it isn't up to the task. Either 1) we let poor people starve, 2) we give them money, or 3) we make work for them. I like #2 (basic income). The people I meet outside of the tech bubble tend to like #1 or #3. Which camp are you in?
- ericd 12y ago
  There are quite a lot of infrastructure upgrades to be made. Laying fiber to every home in America, for example, or a functional high speed rail system (or better yet, a vac train network). We're far from running out of work to be done. We're not exactly at the complete make-work stage yet.
- 3pt14159 12y ago
  I think that poor people starve because the powerful keep them from living freely. Every person should have the right to set up a farm on unused land, but this gets complex in a modern society. Therefore I subscribe to geolibertarianism. Use land taxes to implement a basic income. But let's not spread lies about how we need jobs. We don't. We need houses, and food, and comfort.
  - Datsundere 12y ago
    Nobody wants to farm in this day and age.
    - rch 12y ago
      Drop by Boulder sometime...
  - mikeash 12y ago
    Who decides what land is unused?
- pizza234 12y ago
  The fact that we need some mechanism doesn't mean that any mechanism that "just works" is justifiable. The problem is more at the root, and it's in the fact that the political system in (ahem) some countries is creating a perverse social and occupational structure. With a certain amount of money, we can have the following system (in simplified version): - person 1 builds a jail - person 2 arrests people 3,4 and 5, for possibly trivial reasons - person 6 mantains #3,4,5 in the jail, for an excessive amount of time Or this alternative: - person 2,6 teach primary and seconday education - person 3,4,5 get a sufficient education and have an adequate blue collar life, maybe even white collar - person 1 gets chained at the bottom of the ocean for attempting to corrupt the political system The problem is that when in a society, crime becomes a business, the first case is what you get.

grimtrigger 12y ago

I've never heard this argument being made. The more common charge is that those who roll back the security apparatus are "soft on crime"

rch 12y ago

This is wrong It can absolutely happen, and does fairly often. I know plenty of people in research and academia who have been affected by cutbacks. Maybe we should be spreading those cost saving efforts around more than we are currently.

jcromartie 12y ago
Maybe I should be more specific: It's hard to cut "real" jobs. Academics and research are "out of touch" with "regular folks". At least that's how populist politicians put it. sigh I really look forward to a science/research-based economy.