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Comment by devonbleak | Hacker News Reader

Not with that attitude it's not.

It's not that they can't afford it - it's that they're unwilling to actually leverage the wealth of their country to do it. I seriously don't understand the thinking that resources are still so scarce that an entire country like India somehow can't afford to meet the basic needs of its people (let alone the US). If the resources exist you figure out how to get them to the people that need them. Not doing this is how you get unrest, a massive rise in crime and eventually coups, wars, etc. Democracy and capitalism are not givens - they are very much still experiments that can and do fail.

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Redistributing wealth won't help if the store shelves are empty. People have to be out there working and making stuff or else we won't have any stuff.

Only around 2-8% of people in cities need to work to sustain everyone's livelihoods.

As for those who live off of agriculture, you can ensure basic self sufficiency.

Do you even live in the real world? Because your numbers are just totally disconnected from reality. In my city way more that 8% of people work in essential fields like food production and distribution, emergency services, utilities, transportation infrastructure, vehicle repair, home repair, healthcare, military, etc.

Food distribution and emergency services typically get taken over in good part by the military.

Necessary food production is generally outside of cities.

All Healthcare except for what is immediately necessary similarly is not needed, same for vehicle repair and so on.

Keep in mind, this is only for a very short period of time. You don't have to deploy anywhere near the population needed for a sustainable organization.

For the US for example, there are 55 million "essential workers". 11 million of those are in agriculture or restauration (so either outside of a city or dispensable). 10 million are in finance or residential/commercial facilities services, most of which is preemptible for a few weeks. 4.5 million are in governmental services which can largely either be done remotely or preempted for a few weeks. Realistically you're looking at 25 million or so when you cut down on everything that isn't necessary and have the military take over a lot of the work.

If you want to see what thay looks like, you can look at the Wuhan lockdowns and to a lesser extent various strict lockdowns in third world countries.

Then you tag certain works as "essential" and then eventually everyone argues that they are essential.

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