[mindslight]

Fix potholes? Pick up litter? Clean up subway stations and bus stops? Maintain trails? Education and youth programs? Learning new skills? Building benches, lean-tos, monuments, and other simple structures? Creating new national parks to cover the recent extreme demand? Planting flowers on the side of highways? Spelling out words for aerial photos?

There are many better ways to productively create low skill jobs than hassling and molesting travelers while on a petty power trip.

[nullc]

Stack blocks or some other completely pointless activity: TSA isn't just worthless, by massively slowing down air travel and making it less enjoyable it provides negative value. We would be better off if most of the TSA staff stood out on the tarmac shuffling around pallets all day long for no particular purpose.

[jghn]

I agree with you.

However for large swaths of the country's population people would interpret all of the above as "socialism" and they'd complain. In contrast "defend our people from evil terrorists", either via TSA or military, does not get the same scrutiny.

[mindslight]

Sure, that's called culture. It feeds into itself, and is essentially what we're critiquing. The proto-fascist culture where the only uses of government are domination and control shouldn't be encouraged.

[jghn]

Again, 100% agreed. But for someone wondering "why do we pay these people?", this is the answer.

[mindslight]

You're trying to make this weird middleground between normative and positive statements.

In the positive sense, obviously a whole lot of suckers bought into nonsense about terrorists hiding under their beds. We know this is the unfortunate realpolitik dynamic. We don't need to infer unspoken motivations about jobs programs, because the straightforward narrative of security theater blanket is still carrying the day.

In the normative sense, it's nonsensical to treat the broken culture of fear/domination as inevitable. That culture is wrong, regardless of how overwhelming it is.

[toast0]

Sure, some of those sound like socialism, but not fixing roads, and I don't think cleaning up transit stations either (but of course, having transit stations could be considered socialism, and making therefore making the stations better could be too).

Hell, making roads nice and making nice parks sounds a lot like 'make america great again' to me. But maybe I'm not conservative enough to be the sounding board.

[jghn]

Again, I 100% agree with this too. And yet I guarantee that it'd be excoriated on Fox News.