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Comment by jblow | Hacker News Reader

You have to work out a system, then, to figure out who pays to employ the people doing unprofitable work. Not as easy as it sounds.

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The government should become a temporary employer of last resort for workers who have exhausted their unemployment benefits. They could clean up parks, tutor children, paint over graffiti, update public records, provide child care for other workers, etc. Stuff that would be of value to society but which we often can't afford to pay regular government workers to do. This would help to keep unemployed people in the workforce and doing something productive while they retrain for jobs in higher demand.

And we should subsidize vocational training to a greater extent so that students aren't forced to take on financially crippling loans.

All of the examples you gave of jobs that government should be paying people to do are jobs that are already done in the private sector. Tutoring and child care alone are very large industries.

The biggest issue with your proposal is that if those employees paid by the government to do these jobs are paid less than the private sector, you'll put the private sector out of business. If they're paid the same or better, you would need strong incentives to make them go find a different job instead of keeping a market rate job that is assured to never go away.

You could just as well argue that we should eliminate existing government jobs and contract them out to create more private sector businesses. It's just a matter of degree.

I would propose that the temporary government employees be paid minimum wage. This isn't intended to be permanent.

That minimum wage government child care worker would put a whole bunch of private sector child care workers out of a job because the government can sell their child care services for cheaper than that for profit child care company can even ignoring the fact that the government run child care will be entirely tax payer funded.

There's quite a few jobs for which the government rightfully has a monopoly. I certainly wouldn't want the fire/police forces to be private. We had that and saw the problems it created. Same goes for the military. I'm not aware of an example of a private IRS or judicial system at a national level but I can't possibly see that going well either.

So yes it's a matter of degree but I disagree with you strongly on where to draw the line.

Lots of things are profitable but never absurdly and increasingly profitable, which is the trap we are now in.

There’s no credit given for having a tidy business with steady profit. Instead you have to have “growth” and other this-quarter-must-be-better-than-last-quarter-or-else crap that “investors” want.

What sort of credit are you looking for? There are millions of tidy small businesses with steady profit. Just because you don't see newspaper articles about them doesn't mean they don't exist. Look around.

Small businesses are often able to get credit in the form of bank loans once they have established a track record of profitability.

> but never absurdly and increasingly profitable

You are in a tech bubble. Absurd profitability is not required elsewhere.

Yes but also the entire definition of "profitable" vs "unprofitable" work is messed up.

Simple example: The real, measurable costs of pollution - illness, polluted drinking water, etc - are externalized and so companies doing said polluting are "profitable." Would they still be profitable if those costs were not externalized? I suspect not.

Similarly I suspect there are externalities not being accounted for, for self-interested reasons on the parts of those collecting the profit, when assessing which types of work are profitable or not.

Hmm, in your incentive system, human exterminator might be the most profitable job title.

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