New Chalcedon wrote:Caninope wrote:Well, it actually does, to a small extent.
But it's not a bad thing. American unemployment insurance is not enough to overly incentivize unemployment so that it becomes a problem. In fact, certain types of unemployment can be considered "good". Frictional unemployment is unemployment that results from the mismatch of a person to a particular job; we don't want Physics PhD grads working in ice cream shops, and unemployment insurance helps incentivize their move from ice cream parlor to Physics classrooms.
Now, to the question of whether unemployment insurance incentivizes unemployment to such a large extent to be harmful on the economy? No.
See, now this is more or less the point. The free-market fundamentalists (I refuse to dignify them by calling them "conservatives" - that lumps them in with you, and you deserve better) who want to end any and all forms of social spending fail to see the direct and indirect benefits they bring to society and the economy. This ranges from the prevention of outright class warfare a la the French or Russian Revolutions, to increased economic activity, to greater levels of happiness and social unity across the board.
Should such spending be approached with caution? Absolutely. Everyone who proposed a specific government program should justify its existence by pointing to a specific problem that this program will solve at an acceptable cost, and every government program already extant should regularly be scrutinized to ensure that it is a wise use of the public purse.
But by any rational metric, the US' social programs already meet this standard. Social Security is the most successful - and among the most efficient - poverty-reduction programs in history. Medicare costs per procedure are lower than private-sector medical costs, and the program provides healthcare that seniors won't be able to get in the free market except at exorbitant costs.
And unemployment insurance - as you describe above - prevents physics teachers or philosophers being stuck in ice-cream parlor jobs for their lives where they earn less than their talents merit and generate less wealth for the overall economy, and - as others have described - act as both a barrier to downward pressure on wages/salaries, and as a preventative measure for large-scale social unrest, both of which garner substantial additional benefits for the economy, including those at the top of it.
Of course, none of this matters to free-market fundamentalists like Obamacult, who think that simply repeating their already-debunked bunkum will make it true (see: his repeated citation of the very sources which dispute his argument as somehow "supporting" it), who believe that getting the last word in is synonymous with winning a debate (which is why I left the "Obama Recovery" thread, as it was clear that he would simply repeat himself again and again without bothering to even fairly read what I posted), and who start with a priori assumptions that don't line up with reality and which are never challenged within their reality bubble (see: Obamacult's assumption that people on unemployment benefits attach no moral, ethical or morale value to receiving an earned paycheck over a (also-earned, but less immediately so) payout).
Such people should not call themselves "conservatives", as there is nothing "conservative" about their attitudes or preferred policies. They are radical reactionaries, who would gladly take America back to the days when wealthy magnates boasted of being able to hire half of the working class to kill the other half, when less than half the country's population was literate, when being born poor meant, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, staying poor no matter how hard you worked.
I think the problem in their world view is actually a simple root one: They don't understand that all resources are public because all spending affects other spending.
It is the place of the state in a capitalist system to worry about private sector health care costs, because the money tied up in them is money that could be better spent in a myriad of other places. Private sector resources aren't somehow "different" from public sector resources; they're all a part of the total wealth of a society, and we all live in this society, so we need to make sure our wealth is being distributed in the best way possible. If that means correcting market inefficiencies, if that means removing a market altogether, if that means any action we can take, we should take it, because an economy is a system, and we need to be focused on finding the best system for everyone, not pretending there's nothing we can do to improve our society.
