6 Comments
User's avatar
Geran Kostecki's avatar

Since things we do in wartime are always great, we should probably restrict speech, get rid of habeas corpus, put people in internment camps, raise taxes to 90 percent, draft people to do work, and ration food while we're at it

Andrew's avatar

Idiot. "This one thing is great" does not mean "things we do in wartime are always great".

Geran Kostecki's avatar

The logic of the post, as best I can tell, is that you can tell what actually works during war because the decisions are somewhat existential. But it neglects the fact that we are willing to make a lot of sacrifices in an existential case that we normally wouldn't and shouldn't.

Andrew's avatar

Actually, that comment is wrong too. People make lots of stupid decisions during wartime too. For example, the Nazis expelled or persecuted their best physicists and tied up transportation logistics killing people who weren't a threat at all, which was both evil and stupid. The US putting Japanese people in internment camps, wasting most of their productive capacity in a near-complete absence of evidence of sabotage, was also both evil and stupid. This is more subtle, I wouldn't call that argument obviously dumb, but I do think what's happening is that people start to hate foreigners and ethnicities more than they hate rich people, not find out what works.

Geran Kostecki's avatar

My point is that this post, as I understand it, is saying that we know unions are bad because we got rid of them during war, and I was illustrating that's not a good chain of logic.

Erwin Cuellar's avatar

We could definitely motivate it with incentives. In the housing space for example.