re: #237 Targetpractice

That was more in response to your post. Saying that there will be “risks and costs” is just stating the obvious. Big business has been fighting reform for years, because without a plentiful supply of cheap labor that they can exploit without fear of legal penalty, then they’re left either passing on the costs and losing business in a country that has an insatiable hunger for “cheap” goods, or automating out the work.

Of course the problems with explaining the costs of reform are that most people are uninformed/short-sighted and that politicians have relatively short time-horizons due to their terms of office. Explaining a reform that entails visible costs to the public is likely a loser, since too many people will always being willing to listen to some slick-talking opponent who will say that the talk of costs is all a plot by (fill-in-the-blank), and if the slick talker is elected he’ll make sure that John Q. Public “can have it all!”. And even if that slick talker could be smacked down by his party, the fact remains that passing a reform in which the costs come before many of the benefits is liable to get a politician bounced out of office when the voters head for the polls seeing mostly the costs.

I try not to despair, but part of me thinks the whole preceding paragraph could be summarized in two words: “We’re fucked.”