re: #112 McSpiff

You make the mistake of assuming the inefficiencies are accidental.

No I don’t, since I didn’t address why they exist.

The prison industry is huge, and its benefits are two fold. Mainly rural areas are given a primary employer, and the government keeps unemployed numbers down.

Yep. Though I’m not sure whether the effect on unemployment numbers is actually statistically significant. Also, there’s a lot of NIMBY-ness about prisons— even though they provide a boost to the economy, a lot of voters don’t actually like having them around.

They also provide cheap labor in many cases.

Well, they provide incredibly expensive labor— if you mean cheap to whoever’s employing them, sure. But in the end, incredibly expensive.

Government isn’t so much inefficient, it just has different goals than many of us assume.

Sometimes it’s also inefficient.

Remove the federal government from the economy(as a market player, not regulator or creator) and it all comes crashing down rather quickly.

Remove anything large from the economy and it comes crashing down.

Keeping as many people employed either directly or indirectly through $5,000 toilet seats is no accident.

I’m fairly sure the $5,000 toilet seat thingy is an urban legend.

But anyway: there is tons and tons of real work that the government could be paying for. There is never a need for the government to gin up faked work to give to people. Sure, there’s a benefit of people being employed in the prison industry; so after reducing that industry, take the same money, and use it on infrastructure jobs, use it for police.