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Comment by sunchild | Hacker News Reader

Replace "out of the job" with "back on jobs that actually further the best interests of the public", and your post starts to make sense.

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Bastiat FTW:

http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html#disbanding_troops

All those other in-demand jobs that are available right now, that just can't meet the supply?

Let see ... there is the $3/hour farm hand shortage going around in a few states.

Or do you mean all the new jobs that are going to be created, you know, just-like-that? For which they'll be re-trained, just-like-that? For which they'll get the same pay/benefits, just-like-that?

Rather, I think he means that the US judicial system is currently swamped. Therefore, if drug cases no longer required court time, the load on the system could be brought down to a more manageable level.

The premise of the original post in this thread is fatally flawed – the livelihood of law enforcement, corrections officers, judges, lawyers, and everyone else does not depend on putting personal drug users in prison. They can keep their jobs, and put their talents to use on matters that actually benefit the public's best interests.

You can only transfer so many people into other duties (on the same job) before you reach a point where people are now just getting paid to sit and do nothing.

So the real question is how many people are employed by the war-on-drugs, and how many of them can be re-asigned, and how willing will they be to let this happen.

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