eliotn, could you please start marking off answer posts in your question threads?
People are replying and suggesting answers, and you aren’t accepting any of them. Defeats the purpose of asking a question thread.
As far as your Dad is concerned, if the people in government were doing meaningful work, then they will have jobs outside the government. If they were merely pushing paper or living off the system, then they will have to find a way to provide value.
Essentially your father is arguing that people should have jobs, whether those jobs are needed or not, productive or not, priced in wages appropriately or not.
And that only the government can provide certain jobs.
Which is, nonsense. The one industry the government does supply a lot of labour for, is parasitism. People who contribute little or nothing and live off of others.
Well getting getting rid of government will itself reduce suffering (important to keep that in mind coevally with the suffering caused by being out of a job).
I think your father is looking at the situation from an inverted perspective. It’s not so much “state employees being out of a job will cause them suffering” so much as “state employees having a job causes everyone else to suffer”; the important ethical distinction between the two is that, in the former, one group of people is living at another’s expense which is patently unjust.
Anyway, I don’t think anyone advocates state abolition (or reformation, I suppose) by violent revolution or whatever. There is no reason to think that a huge number of people would suddenly become unemployed overnight.
Sounds kind of like the broken-window fallacy, if you ask me. I suggest that you thoroughly explain the broken-window fallacy to your pop, and if that doesn’t work, break all his windows. [:P]
There is a robber who takes people’s TVs and sells them. The robber also takes your dad’s TV. But the robber dropped his ID while leaving your dad’s house. So your dad has the identity of the robber. Does he turn in the robber to the police? What about the inconvenience to the robber who will no longer have a job stealing if he is arrested? What if he dropped his cell phone that had all his contacts of every other robber in town? Wouldn’t a lot of robbers lose their jobs if he turns them in?
Then ask your dad what makes what the robber did wrong? True crimes boil down to three types:
1)violating someone’s person
2)violating someone’s property
3)violating someone’s activities(liberties)
Then ask your dad WHY it’s wrong to do these things. Then ask your dad if it’s wrong if the government does these things. Then go through some examples:
-government stealing part of the money(property) he’s received in exchange for his labor
-government forcing education
-government apprehending someone engaging in any activity that doesn’t include violating someone elses person, property, or activities
Anything that would be wrong for an individual to do would most certainly be especially wrong for the institution to do that we implemented to secure justice.
Now, ask him to repeat the last line of the pledge of allegiance:
“and justice for all.”
Then ask him this: Do you believe that if justice prevails instead of injustice, would society be a better place for all? Wouldn’t all of those criminals and those aiding and abetting the crime be better off doing something productive for society instead?