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Comment by scollet | Hacker News Reader

I may be missing what you mean by "taking advantage" but isn't that the point? Like taking advantage of a life raft after going overboard.

If someone chooses to not be employed and it brings them basic needs and recuperation, then I see the system working well.

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You shouldn't be able to "choose to not be employed", someone else is picking up the slack for you and you are taking away benefits that could be used on someone that NEEDS it (disability, elderly, etc.)

When others see that you can just give up and get paid, they will also become burnouts.

Eventually you will run out of other people's money.

I wish this logic was more frequently applied to large corporations and their externalities or to the military. How much money was flushed down the drain to develop dubious weapon systems like the F-35 or to clean up messes like Deepwater Horizon. Yet when we give ordinary people some money suddenly it's a moral failing on their part and we're "picking up the slack".

Here's an idea: next time there's an oil spill, lets take the money for cleanup out of the executives' bank accounts (and investments, and properties) before we dig into the public coffers. Then we can talk about freeloaders at the bottom.

I do too, but currently the opposite logic is being applied to unemployment benefits. Maybe there will be an article about those shady defense contracts and eco projects but that's not the topic.

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