i just don't get how so many people seem to be capable of saying "we need to artificially create work that doesn't need to be done so that people have jobs" with a straight face
@xnx38h there’s tons of work that actually needs to be done though. At least in America. There is a huge deficit of public works and public services. We could employ every single able person in the country with urgently necessary work if there was a will to.
@xnx38h how many children and sick and elderly people need care? How much restoration work do our decaying rural communities need? How much rail and other infrastructure needs to be built? How much better staffed should education for every age and need be? And on and on. We are a critically underserved country. There is plenty to do.
@xnx38h I’m a bigger fan of full employment (including treating art, music, raising one’s own children, etc, etc. as paid labor, mutual aid in disabled and other communities) than paying able people to be idle. Workers have inherent political power that people on subsidies don’t have. Recipients of public charity have a hard time going on strike. And maybe it’s the Protestant in me, but I think that, given a suitable public-good definition of work, work is good for most folks.
But doing work for private profit less efficiently in order to boost numbers on purpose is dumb, I totally agree.
@bulkington yep, that too