I posted the second chapter of “Absolon” today.

It’s kind of freaky, actually. I wrote it, and posted it. In this chapter we start to see what happened to the world after WW3, and what people are dealing with in their daily lives.

One part of it, I think I might spoil a little, because I was shocked to learn it wasn’t as inconceivable as I thought it might be.

In Michigan they just passed a law that requires community service (that is, they will have people work for free) in order to get basic health care and food stamps, and/or unemployment.

Sounds kind of straight forward, right? Even a little intuitive when you think about it. They get “free money from the state” so lets have them work for it.

Now lets look a little deeper.

Everyone who works pays into the system. We pay taxes, social security, and medicaid. We pay these things so that when we are down and out, out of a job, and looking for a new one, then we have a little security to fall back. We also get roads, military, politicians, and all sorts of other things out of the deal. Not all of which we agree with, but we pay our taxes, elect our officials and hope things work out.

Second, there is a system for unemployment for a reason. Everyone who works pays into it. And when we are out of work we take from it. That is how it has worked for a very long time. It gives everyone a chance to look for a new job, get well (if it was a medical reason) or just take a breather and recover for a bit before jumping back into the rat race.

Not everyone will get a chance to take advantage of unemployment, but shouldn’t we be grateful? Unemployment only pays a small percentage of what you were making before hand. Not enough to pay your bills usually. Who the heck wants to be on unemployment? Most people want to get back to work as soon as possible.

Which brings us to another problem in this system…. Work.

If you have a bunch of people on unemployment and food stamps working for the city for free, then what happens to the people who did those jobs before the city started getting free “community service”? Do they get laid off? Fired? Restructured? Retrained?

Or do you throw them back on the unemployment lines so they have to come back and do the job they were doing before, only this time for free.

Even if you figure that the people working this community service are doing it for “pay” in the form of unemployment and food stamps, how can you guarantee that they are being paid a decent wage for that time? How do you measure that? How do they still have time to go find a “real” job?

Why not just create new jobs and hire them?

Grumble, grumble, grumble….

Anyway, there is a lot more to this argument. A lot of fall out that could happen if it passes, and sticks.