Kuwoobie wrote:
gbaji wrote:
No. In the absence of easily available assistance programs, more people will seek employment as a means to sustain themselves economically. This isn't a fantasy.
If by "employment" you mean looting and armed robbery. Sure.
The fantasy is the belief that you and your crowd have that people aren't working because they just don't gosh darn feel like it. How can you not see the overwhelming demand for jobs in a world where there are fewer and fewer of them every moment? You think forcing desperate people to seek "employment" whatever there may be is going to help anyone? What sort of "jobs" do you think they will find after being unemployed for any extended amount of time? Does adding even more competition for what few jobs become available magically create more jobs for other people who are looking for one?
It's kind of like how if we give more money to employers they'll hire a bunch of people they just
couldn't afford to hire before-- because when you run a business, having extra money means hiring people you don't really need or weren't going to hire anyway. I guess forcing more people to "seek employment" will make employers do this too.
Edited, Apr 2nd 2014 2:19am by Kuwoobie My favorite part of the "people just don't want to work" fantasy is how little it holds up to scrutiny, at all, in our current economy.
Walmart just recently opened its first two stores in the DC metro area. They received 23,000 applications for 600 positions, which effectively makes the odds of getting accepted lower than the odds of getting accepted when applying to Harvard (as all the headlines on the subject point out).
Obviously, these are all lazy ******** who just don't want to work. They all submitted applications
ironically. ******* hipsters.
But the thing is, these areas don't look so bad on paper. The unemployment rate seems low (something like 5%), and the DC metro area has
a lot of wealth in it. But since we're talking about massive income disparity here (particularly across racial lines), it really breaks down. 5% unemployment sounds like a healthy number in the context of a healthy economy - that's a number that suggests decent mobility between positions (because the laborer is the one in demand). But when that 5% is actually because you have a massive problem with unemployment in the lower class sectors, because unskilled work doesn't exist, it's a very different context.
SHOCKINGLY, having a whole ******* of million/billionaires in the area does **** to meaningfully stimulate the local economy. It's almost like the rich have a tendency hoard their capital, instead of reinvesting it back into the economy...
Yeah, it's great that 600-900 more people are getting jobs from Walmart. Too bad the wage of $8.25 an hour is barely livable when we're talking 40 hour work weeks (which the vast majority of those employees will not be getting). And Walmart is hardly pulling in small margins, the company could easily pay out quite a bit more and still turn really solid profits.
Why don't they?
Because we have an economy where they have guaranteed labor for the absolute minimum wage, because the people who hold those jobs
need those jobs, because other jobs just don't exist.
At the end of the day, the real question here is what the **** those other 22,400 people are supposed to do. Anyone with even a modicum of human decency doesn't have the first thought of, ********** them, it's their own fault."
