Animal Theater

Full Employment in America

Fighting the Correct Enemy

A hardworking, honest person can find themselves unemployed through no fault of their own. I state this upfront because it is absolutely true. My concern here is not with the character and qualities of the unemployed person, but with the state called unemployment itself.

This paper proposes a radical solution to the problem of unemployment. To use a medical analogy, my proposal fights the disease itself, not the carrier, and not the cause.

Why not fight the cause of unemployment? The answer is obvious: That fight has already been lost. In the absence of thousands of new industries popping up overnight to employ the millions of Americans without work, something else has to be done. We must deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.

If unemployment is the problem then we must fight unemployment, not business, not government or global trade. Our fight must be directed against unemployment itself, which is why I propose that it be made illegal.

I'm proposing that we, as a society, incarcerate the unemployed.

Freedom Aint Free (and neither is anything else)

'But an honest, hardworking person can find themselves unemployed through no fault of their own,' the argument goes, 'and your proposal would take away that person's freedom, which is something we're all entitled to.' This argument works perfectly if you view the unemployed person as living in a vacuum, and not in the society that you and I share.

My response would be: What about the honest, hardworking person with a job? Shouldn't they have the freedom not to live in a world full of hunger, violence, extreme poverty, and criminality?

The vast majority of unemployed people are not homeless or starving, so who is paying for their food and shelter? An employed person is. Even if they're not supporting an unemployed family member, they pay through taxes that go to welfare programs, or rising costs at stores to offset petty thefts. In some cases they pay by becoming the victim of crime. Those who have jobs are paying for the survival of those who don't.

And not all of the costs of unemployment are obvious. There are security costs, and all the lost revenue that used to come out of paychecks and go into city budgets. That money covered things like sewage treatment centers, water pumps, road maintenance, trash collection, and public schools. The cost of these things hasn't gone down, but the number of people who are paying for them has. That means the people who are paying have to pay more, one way or another.

Prison Without Punishment

A person with a job is a person with something at stake. A person without a job is only interested in seeing upheaval and change. As Bob Dylan once sang, 'When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.'

This is not an attack on the unemployed person, it is an attack on unemployment. We lock up drug dealers to fight drugs, rapists to fight rape, and thieves to fight theft. Incarceration serves two distinct purposes: To punish the perpetrator, and to benefit society by removing the perpetrator from it. Every jail sentence contains both a negative and positive aspect, negative to the convict and positive to society.

My proposal would see the creation of a new type of non-punitive detention. This would be a class of the prison population who aren't being punished for anything, but whose continued liberty causes harm to society. I'm suggesting a new way of thinking about detention and incarceration. If we remove the negative, punitive side of the sentence, we're left only with the positive benefit to society.

And who could argue that society wouldn't be better off without the unemployed?

Political Distortion