Consider you lived in a community which has seen 8 generations of fishermen. (Or miners…) Say the catch lessened, supplies depleted and it was no longer considered economic to fish as a profession. Should the community be left to die? Should the government help with subsidy to protect the jobs?
I understand the ‘right to work’ principle. I understand people wish to remain in a line of work they know well. The debate is, although people have a right to procure a job, do they have the right to a specific job? If the market is no longer there, should they just move on, and find new jobs? If not, why not?
No, not really. I was just curious to hear arguments for and against the subsidy of specific professions.
If the market has disappeared then should the workers have to move sector or should their original jobs be retained / supported by governent money? Would it be cheaper / more ethical to pay for the continuance of their way of life rather than to pay walfare to the entire community, if their skills were considered untransferable?
People don’t have the right to possess a job, nor do they have the right towards a specific job. It is pretty fundamental IMO, that people don’t have the ‘right’ to do anything. Might makes right? Ability makes right? Capacity makes right? Desire makes right?
Some communities claim they should have / be given the opportunity to continue in the same professions they have ‘always’ worked, as their fathers and grandfathers did.
Would you prefer to see entire communities become ghost towns rather than subsidised? 3000 people on welfare rather than in (unprofitable) work?
people do not have a right to work in what they fancy. They have a right to work in what other people find useful work.
>> Some communities claim they should have / be given the opportunity to continue in the same professions they have ‘always’ worked, as their fathers and grandfathers did.
So they want to continue to manufacture buggy whips even though nobody buys them any more? And they want my money to subsidise their lifestyle? Sorry. If they want to make a living let them find something useful to do. Or you can buy their useless products or just send them money.
—Some communities claim they should have / be given the opportunity to continue in the same professions they have ‘always’ worked, as their fathers and grandfathers did.—
Nothing is stopping them if they want to do this. However, the idea that anyone should pay them extra merely to support their lifestyle is outrageous.
Subsidizing an industry just because demand/capacity has slacked off is ridiculous economically, and certainly unfair to the people who have to pay for it. Job re-training programs can, I think, be well justified, but they are certainly not required by justice in every situation.
—Would you prefer to see entire communities become ghost towns rather than subsidised? 3000 people on welfare rather than in (unprofitable) work?—
What’s the difference? People working unprofitably is a waste of everyone’s time and money. I’d much rather have people simply be on the dole, and have time to do other things (like look for jobs, be with their families, whatever they want), than I would them wasting their time doing pointless work.
Rather than pay men to sit at home, say £300,000 a week in benefit, would it not be better to run a mine at £200,000 a week in losses, and have the coal extracted from the ground, the men busy and feeling useful, and the community kept together? The government saves money, the miners have jobs, the mine is kept from disrepair.
Farmers get subsidised all the time to ensure they keep providing food, regardless of wheter they run their farms at a profit or not. Should they have different standards applied to them purely due to the fact they are producing a necessary product?
—Rather than pay men to sit at home, say £300,000 a week in benefit, would it not be better to run a mine at £200,000 a week in losses, and have the coal extracted from the ground, the men busy and feeling useful, and the community kept together?—
No. If no one is willing to pay enough to have the coal taken out of the ground profitably in the first place, then no one needs or wants it badly enough to justify diverting money from other TRULY productive and profitable activities just to get it out. That’s what you are missing here: some sense of the opportunity cost. The money for this doesn’t just come out of thin air: it, at some point, has to be taken out of OTHER productive activities: meaning away from OTHER workers with their own concerns, communities, and so on.
Personally, I don’t think I’d feel very useful knowing that I was being paid to do a task that no one really had any use for. That doesn’t seem all that different from the way the Nazis forced concentration camp prisoners to continually dig and refill holes just to keep them budy: which, by the way, drove many of the prisoners stark raving mad.
If the workers choose to just “sit at home” that’s their choice. But it’s hardly the only viable one, and the whole point is that then at least they could choose the activities that they’d most like (including finding other jobs), without the silly pretense that they are really still working as miners.
For all I care, they could go down to the mine and pretend to work, or use their newly found free time to create even more of a sense of community.
Of course, in most cases, welfare is not really what I’d advocate in the first place: I just said that it was preferable to the fiction of subsidized work, not preferable overall.
Government subsidies are an abomination which distort the market and make the economy worse for everyone. They take money from profitable enterprises to support unprofitable activities. All of Europe has been cutting back on that type of subsidy in the last 20 years because it was getting out of hand and threatening with sinking the entire economy.
Subsidies to farming are outrageous on a second level because they prevent third world countries from entering a market where they could have a better chance. First we make sure we keep them poor by subsidising our farmers, then we send them aid.
The reason mines are closing in the UK is that is costs around £31 / ton to extract coal here. Coal can now be imported from South African mines at a cost of £28 / ton. So globally, it is not cost effective. So this is one industry moving to poorer nations.
But this wasn’t really about miners, or any specific cause. I actually agree with all your points, and am deliberately (and unsuccessfully) trying to argue against my own opinion.
I was hoping to create some new arguments in my head, rather than the (what seems rather dismissive of communities problems) “get another job” rant, which I have always believed.
I wanted someone to help provide valid arguments against this line of thought. No one has, least of all me. Perhaps there is no argument against it, as economic laws rules all.
This was brought up when the areospace industry went through a perodic crash (one of many) on wether should anyone pay for retraining the laid off workers to the jobs they wanted
There was some feeling that people should fend for themselves but since the areospace industry is goverment connected (well at least here anyways)
After a lengthy debate the state did it through the unemployment office and special grants for school and the like
A intersting side effect is a lot of people who tookthe training became web designers and the like and when the market for that went down one person said " I’ve went to schol for two professions and both are basically useless at the moment … its time to retire "
The way I see it, government subsidies or intervention of any kind is only justified in sudden, extreme, unforeseeable circumstances and should be extremely limited in time and scope.
If due to a terrorist attack the government grounds all airlines for a week, it is reasonable that it should compensate them for the losses but this should be a one time thing strictly limited to that actual event. If airlines lose money and go out of business then the best thing for the economy is to let that airline go under and let the people find jobs where they are better productive. Supporting unproductive activities just encourages unproductive activities.
—The reason mines are closing in the UK is that is costs around £31 / ton to extract coal here. Coal can now be imported from South African mines at a cost of £28 / ton. So globally, it is not cost effective. So this is one industry moving to poorer nations.—
Well, here’s an arguement you may not have heard before: if this situation was the case because of restrictive import laws that have now been lowered, then, far from deserving subsidies, the mining industry should have to reimburse their fellow citizens for exploitation. After all, they were, by force of unjust law (because after all: who was responsible for those protective laws?), overcharging consumers for coal, exploiting them to make an extra buck.
When slavery ended, no one thought it was fair that the exploited slaves had to reimburse their masters. Well, actually, back then many people DID think it was fair. But our understanding of justice today seems to suggest exactly the opposite: sure, slavery was legal, but it was an unjust law that made it so. And when that law was defeated, if anything, the slaveowners owed the slaves for expropriating their labor against their will, not the other way round.
Most people think that arguement is insane. But I think there’s definately something to it, and it certainly makes me a little uncomfortable to think about the apparent inconsistency in justice.
I am really not well informed enough about Amtrak to make any argument. In genral I feel long term subsidies (and this seems to be the case) are not justified except in the most extreme circumstances but I would have to dedicate more time to this than I am realling willing. Amtrak would need to be judged in the context of air travel and other alternatives and in the context of fuel prices and tax policies. It is really much more complex than I can judge. It could be that changes in certain market conditions would make Amtrak profitable without subsidies. I have no idea.
I think what the OP had in mind was when environmnetal regulations threaten to shut down a particular industry–such as fishing or logging–in a particular region. Those whose “way of life” is threatened argue that they are akin to a minority group whose “identity” would be taken away if they weren’t allowed to continue in this line of work, thus violating their civil rights.
What some cities have done in cases where their livelihood has been threatened is to attract other kinds of businesses to provide different (and in some cases vastly better) jobs.
Say the mine goes under (no pun intended). The city offers incentives like tax abatement to attract other companies, as long as x% of the jobs at that facility go to local people. Usually, it works. The local people get new jobs that pay a living wage, the city (and region) gets an economic boost, with the taxes people pay offsetting the loss from the tax abatement.
This is one of those things where it’s not really an either-or thing. People do occasionally have to get creative.
Well, the OP says nothing about environmental regulations: in fact it seems more consistent with the idea that fishermen outfished their area, or the miner mined out most of their available ores.