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Comment by beebeepka | Hacker News Reader

Does it not create jobs?

Not saying it's good nor bad.

According to their website, there are 15.5 FT employees. I don't consider healthy adults getting paid to do meaningless work a benefit to society.

It can function as a jobs program, giving living wages to more people, and letting them spend their salary back into the economy.

But it would be nice if jobs programs produced more benefit.

What generally happens is that a select few get to receive pay for a fake job and everyone else of worse off by having to pay for it by force.

Actual benefit comes when people get paid by other people voluntarily making the exchange

There's plenty of work of more value than pumping gas that would give people a living wage and put a lot more back into the economy. Right now it's a drain on the economy, albeit miniscule compare to the whole. Either way, it drives up prices and costs of operation. A jobs program should at least have some benefit beyond being an indirect tax on everyone. Otherwise we might as well just take the same people and pay them to dig holes they fill in the next day while letting people buying gas get through the process a little faster without having to wait for a spare attendant at a busy station. It's always frustrating to pull up to a station with 12 pumps and just 1 or 2 attendants on a busy day as a dozen cars lined up behind the ones at the pumps. Then have to wait 10 minutes just to get the pump started in your own car.

And all I can think about are the two attendants running back & forth trying to get as many pumps going as they can, running ragged for a completely bogus reason. Then sometimes the attendants don't even try and the wait is longer, yet those are making the more rational choice of not driving themselves crazy making shit money for a worthless task.

I understand that 95% of American defense is a jobs program. Let's fry the bigger fish first.

To be fair, you can actually use that for some purpose if you really wanted.

I don’t think that is the case for a redundant board.

By what metric? About 25% of the military budget is in salaries, and a professional military has to be paid whether or not they're in combat.

I got through college doing meaningless jobs.

Security jobs, and working at a gas station, allowed me to do all my homework.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window for why this is bad.

So is there also a kind of "reverse broken window" fallacy, e.g., for housing, where not tearing down an old... excuse me... "historic" building prevents the creation of bigger and better things?

If it creates jobs and doesn't do anything, it is bad, like anything else that has a cost but no benefits. Jobs are costs -- they force you to spend your life doing one thing when you could be doing all manner of other useful things. Only if your job produces useful things does that benefit outweigh the cost of having to spend your life on it.

No benefits? It keeps people off the streets and gives them something to do, pointless or not. The net benefit to society is positive, which is why it keeps getting voted for.

I live in a place with a severe homeless problem. I wish these people had pointless government jobs rather than be out begging on the street.

That makes sense, thanks!

Some quick searching showed there are about 10,000 gas station attendant jobs in NJ.

So we could take 5,000 of them and have them dig holes all day. And the other 5,000 could fill in the holes on the following days. That's about as productive.

Or, if we're viewing it purely as a jobs program, find meaningful work, even if it was just patrolling the town they would have pumped gas in & instead picking up any and every piece of litter and garbage they see, documenting potholes they see in the road or loose branches around power lines for the town's DPW to deal with proactively.

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. Much, if not all, of politics, on both sides, for ordinary people, is concerning who gets what welfare. For every Oregon FAA there are probably 100 offices in the military and government agricultural sector that provide a small number of good but sort of meaningless jobs.

For every 1 soldier actually shooting bullets or 1 bonafide back-bending farmer there are 999 comfy desk jobs for college educated people in the same org chart. Many for whom college was paid for by that government. Is that good or bad?

> Is that good or bad?

I’m gonna go with bad.

Do you just fire them and let them go on unemployment? If everything else is held constant, then there's nothing done and more people without money. It's an even greater drain on society, not to mention these people's lives.

You fire them and let them get a job where they can do something beneficial for society. There's more than enough work out there, hell just picking up trash would provide more value than they currently do.

I'd rather have people on welfare than in these bureaucratic jobs that actually hamper progress, because well they need to be 'involved'

People who want the "star trek future" don't seem to understand that, yes, work is valuable in its own right. It's better to work for your meal than have it handed to you. So, a primary concern of society is indeed keeping its people gainfully employed and we see outcomes that would not make sense were this not the case.

Indeed. Is a pointless but harmless job worse for society than preventable poverty? I think not.

Is that always the case? No, of course not.

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