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Agree. A related dark position that a not-insignificant number of people hold is that it's actually necessary and perhaps beneficial to have a visible homeless class living in unnecessarily cruel conditions as a means of coercion to keep working no matter how terrible your job is.

I suppose it makes sense from a certain perspective, but I think the lack of a safety net is a costly economic mistake. Take bankruptcy as an example, you can take risks and if something goes wrong (including bad decisions), you are not necessarily ruined forever because we allow you to walk away from some or all of the debt.

There's a cost to allowing bankruptcy, but I think it's worth it even though I've had to "pay" (indirectly) for other's bad decisions. I think about all the value lost to society because we make the danger of not having a job, even for a short time, very high for most members of society.



The technical term for the phenomenon you've identified is the "reserve army of labor."




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