|
This is 100% wrong. We have a large surplus of labor, and no demand for it. Wages have been stagnant for decades. If there was a demand for labor, wages would be increasing. They're not. It's common for a minimum wage job (or below) to have 200+ applicants. You're suggesting that when 200 people apply for a single waitress job, all 200 should be hired? That's going to be a really crowded restaurant. The Fire Marshal might have a problem with that. How many people do you need to hand you your burger anyway? Agricultural jobs are out. Less than 2% of the workforce now produces more than double the food the entire population needs, plus exports, cattle feed, pet food, biofuels, and agricultural products used in manufacturing, etc. Manufacturing is rapidly going the same direction. Soon less than 2% of the population will be able to manufacture way more stuff than we need. That leaves only the service sector. The service sector is a weird beast, ranging from the below-minimum-wage waiters/waitresses (for which there is no demand) up to professionals like psychiatrists (where we really do have a scarcity). But at the moment, at least, costs of higher education are skyrocketing. Sending those 200 unsuccessful waiters through 8-10 years of school to become psychiatrists would enable some few to excel, but what about the rest? And what about the cost? Having 200 people serve you your burger is not a solution. Forcing 200 unsuccessful waiters through 8-10 years of higher education is not a solution. Forcing children, the elderly, and the disabled to work is not a solution. The main problem is a lack of demand for labor, and the only way to solve that is to artificially create a demand. But now you're just paying people to dig holes that don't need to be dug and then fill them back in. That's useless and degrading. Why are we even doing that? What is the law of nature proclaiming that anyone who doesn't spend most of their life making someone else richer should die of starvation? We need to rethink the basics. We need to rethink what we expect of people and why. This is not a futuristic sci-fi singularity thing, this is something that is happening right here and now, and it's already affecting us. |