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The government could easily solve this by not offering welfare or social assistance programs.

In such cases, workers would simply be unwilling to work somewhere that cannot provide an income to meet their needs.

You describe a problem generated through moral hazard.



Those employees need to survive long enough to find better employment. While I agree with the moral hazard, we’d have to allow lynching of corporate officials by those same poor as a means to counter power imbalance on the corporate side.


It seems unreasonable to demand that person A gets to murder person B unless person B gives person A their property while simultaneously saying person B isn't allowed to murder person A for theirs.

We have private charity to help fill the gap between a skills/resource deficiency and a paying job.


We tried that. It collapsed during the Great Depression.

If you look at the real unemployment rate is presently around 7%. During the 2020 downturn it was around the same as Great Depression. https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-is-the-real-unemploymen...

I want private charity to work. Sadly I think you’ll need to have a public private partnership.


The length of the great depression was a direct cause of failed government intervention, first by Hoover then by FDR. This article does a great job explaining why:

https://fee.org/articles/what-caused-the-great-depression/

Here's a quote related to the affect of FDR's imposed federal minimum wage; the consequences are similar to what I've argued above:

""" The President’s Re-employment Agreement called for a minimum wage of 400 an hour ($12 to $15 a week in smaller communities), a 35-hour work week for industrial workers and 40 hours for white collar workers, and a ban on all youth labor.

This was a naive attempt at "in­creasing purchasing power" by in­creasing payrolls. But, the im­mense increase in business costs through shorter hours and higher wage rates worked naturally as an anti revival measure. After passage of the Act, unemployment rose to nearly 13 million. The South, especially, suffered severely from the minimum wage provi­sions: the Act forced 500,000 Blacks out of work. """

Here is a paper that argues New Deal spending crowded out 30% of faith-based benevolent charity:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...


Thank you. I look forward to reading them.




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