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"No precedent in American history!" NYT would have defended child labor. (thelemmy.club)
submitted 17 hours ago by to c/workreform@lemmy.world
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[–] 9 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (3 children)

Right, there's no precedent in American history for declaring an entire class of business to be illegal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States

I think you guys have maybe heard about this.

https://www.nytimes.com/1930/01/02/archives/prohibition.html

Oh hey look, yeah, you did!

You can not like it but can... can we not, with the blatant historical revisionism?

You could also just point out the Sherman AntiTrust Act, point at that, maybe.

Oh right we also banned gambling, tons of forms of gambling, back in the day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_in_the_United_States

PASPA

I wonder what the kalshi odds are on that happening again...?

Anyway uh, the Old Gray Lady needs to go to fuckin' bed now, thanks.

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  • [–] 6 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

    I'm gonna be real with you:

    Comparing Universal Healthcare to Prohibition is the single worst pro-universal-healthcare take I've ever heard. Prohibition nearly broke this country. People lost their faith in the constitution, crime skyrocketed, people started dying from poorly distilled liquor and poisoned ethanol. It was a constitutional disaster.

    Your other examples were acceptable, but I'd maybe leave the puritan moralizing constitutional amendment out of any future comparisons.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

    It is nontheless a precedent for a massive reworking of the US economy by way of outlawing particular kinds of business activity.

    Also 'constitutional disaster' and 'skyrocketing (white collar) crime' describe at the very least the last 6 years, so... its apt.

    And... an actual serious problem that would happen if we did Universal Healthcare right now is that this would reduce paperwork and bureacracy so much that you'd lose about a million or two million jobs.

    That's how much of a wasteful behemoth our current private system is, that many bullshit jobs, that many consumer incomes in a consumption based economy.

    To realistically do a Universal Healthcare switch in the US, to be responsible, you would need something like the CCC or JobCorp or AmeriCorp on steroids, otherwise you'd cause a recession.

    We could also maybe ban private prisons, as a business model, but to my knowledge there's never been a federal / nation wide legislation push to do that.

    Or, maybe we could try to actually fix the car centric nature of the US by doing something like... mandatory full drivers liscense retest every 5 years, every 3 years past 65, every single year past 75, and any time you get any traffic violation of any kind, you must fully retest within 1 year, or your liscense is revoked. If your income is below AMI, testing is free.

    If that worked as intended, well, we'd have a lot less cars and car related businesses, which are also a considerable chunk of megacorp and small business activity.

    Or you could go further than the ... 92? Assault Weapons Ban and actually rework the 2nd Ammendment. If you could somehow do that, well again, megacorps and a considerable number of small businesses would have greatly reduced demand for civillian firearms, thus people lose jobs.

    Anytime you massively rework part of an economy, by substantial new policy... you are reworking the economy, society broadly.

    My point was that precedent for doing that kind of thing does infact exist.

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