There are no jobs that want jobless people. There's few that even want 18 year olds
If it’s not worth minimum wage it’s been judged as not worth doing like that. You can automate picking up trash which is exactly the kinds of thing you avoid doing if labor is cheap enough. As such the wage floor is very much a benefit to society by opening a wedge for automation rather than having people do such tasks.
It’s backed up by the finite supply of unemployed people willing and able to work below minimum wage.
As to your obsession with clean streets, the government does spend money on it the general public doesn’t actually care enough to spend more on it. It doesn’t matter how cheap it is as long as nobody is willing to fund it.
That’s literally the first time you made that argument, so obviously I didn’t counter it.
If you argument was simply to send these people to prison then just suggest that. The only thing worth discussing is non prison labor and thus non forced labor.
Nope, the original context:
There are no jobs that want jobless people. There's few that even want 18 year olds
Your response was: Plenty of work for prison laborers.
My response of “at 20-50 cents an hour, but that’s not really relevant here.“ Obviously 20-50 cents is the nominal prison labor rate, but it also excludes the overhead of keeping prisoners which is what makes it “irrelevant” as a cost.
Thus by responding to the nominal rate you implicitly acknowledged we are no longer talking about prisoners because the actual cost of prison labor is ~64,000$ / year / inmate not their nominal wage.
Not a 64,000$ drain on society. There’s roughly 1 correction officer per 4.9 inmates and that excludes many jobs associated with prisoners like administrative staff etc.
Inmates are really fucking expensive.
> a single shelter bed could cost up to $70,000
https://sfstandard.com/2022/12/30/ending-homelessness-in-san...
You are basing things on economics 101 models, demand curves max out. People don’t drink infinite water when it gets cheap enough. I don’t think streets need to be cleaned as much as they are, and that’s not based on how much it costs to clean them.
Long term homeless are on the streets almost exclusively for reasons of severe mental illness not lack of skills etc.
Further most homeless end up in paying jobs, which says something about those who don’t make that transition.
You might say "don't treat humans as commodities"; well, reality doesn't care specially about humans; we are just animals even if we like to think we aren't.
I never thought I'd see someone unironically epouse the ideas of Ebeneezer Scrooge, but here we are.
As a starting point to benefiting from society there is a reasonable expectation that people put a couple of hours a day into making life better for others. Prisoners can achieve that lofty goal. So can people travelling on the NY Metro without paying. There is a lot of room to haggle over the details, but argument from chubby ghost of Christmas present is not really the path to a good compromise.
Where community service works if for e.g. misbehaving kids with non-absentee parents. Because then the parents make sure the kid actually does the community service, and the kid is thereby deterred from doing it again.
If you do the same thing for someone who is going to blow off the community service, then you'd need the police to make them do the community service, and police get six figures in salary and benefits, so that's a very expensive babysitter and you've eliminated any kind of net benefit.
I’m not proposing moving from these people providing $0.00 to taking whatever a person to monitor their work and provide institutional food costs, I’m proposing we move from these people costing a society a shitload, both financially and health/safety wise, to perhaps similar financially, but removing the health and safety burden and finally putting them on a path to success.
It also costs a lot more than building homeless shelters. It even costs more than mental health services and welfare programs, neither of which are cheap. It is quite possibly the most expensive option that anyone regularly proposes.