read here for my Really Good Idea about how we can solve the defense shortage: https://lemmy.ml/post/17574247
The cant-be-bothered-reading-ulysses-will-read-dubliners of my Really Good Idea is: we get 5-20% of the population into a volunteer militia. They carry light arms and train part time. The militia pays for itself because they do valuable volunteer labour like Marx said they would.
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Say the non-military volunteer labour they do is 100 hours a year for the first three years, then 40 hours a year in subsequent years. But let's call it average 50 hours a year because I won't do harder maths than that on a Sunday.
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Say 12.5% of our population is in the militia = 672,500 brave souls
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equals 33,625,000 volunteer labour-hours per year
NOW he said, jabbing with a finger the table, we have another pressing issue besides the defense gap. Not lynching Bono, I'm talking about childcare costs.
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331,783 sprogs in childcare say the CSO – for about 15 hours a week, 50 weeks a year is about 250 million hours of sprog-tending
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At ratios of about 5 Big People to each Darling Child that's about 50 million hours of Labour
Recapeen: 50 million hours of childcare to be done, the People's Militia has 33,625,000 volunteer labour-hours to donate to the country
We can take a massive bite out of the current prohibitive cost of childcare. The vetting would be the same: people you can trust with a gun you can trust with a child.
They wouldn't HAVE TO wear uniforms and carry arms during the volunteer-work but it would probably be a good idea for purposes of humour.
