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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27540 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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Sure, this is a stupid example- and we can do without them(or with them being prohibitively expensive). But there's numerous jobs(many in construction) in which every single person who does it long term is permanently on probation because they are legally required to have jobs and can't find other ones. Lots of much-harder-to-do-without agricultural jobs, too.

There's something biblical about the idea that the men who build homes (and other buildings) are the same men society has determined aren't quite worthy of being a full part of society.

I suppose I have less of an issue with citizens who have done bad things having to get shit jobs, since they're their home country's problem to deal with either way.

Still, I'm confident that our economic system is robust, and we'd figure something out if we had to. Would our houses be slightly worse? I don't know, since you didn't say what the jobs are, specifically. If it's roofers working in Phoenix when it's 120 out or something, maybe it would be more expensive and certain styles of roof would become less feasible, hard to say, it would be worth trying. Almost everyone used to work in agriculture and repair their own houses, I'm sure the current arrangement of turning everything into an assembly line isn't the only possible one.

The argument from @Gaashk stands, I think. We didn’t need slaves in the northern states since the founding, in the west since the early 19th, and the south since the mid-19th. Suddenly in the late 20th we discover slavery to be a necessary institution for agricultural work that was heretofore done even by so cushy an ethnicity as the English. Construction, same deal. What has changed? Does nobody sense something wrong in the fact that the Land of the Free is suddenly regressing so far as to demand a permanent underclass? This is why I don’t trust any of the economic statements on this matter. The whole argument has no sense of history to it.

There were far more desperate people in nineteenth and early twentieth century America.

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