Unemployment Benefits

Unemployment benefits were a bad idea.
Another way that the government has tried to protect its citizens from small misfortunes.
I return, over and over again, to Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.) poem
"The wonderful one-hoss shay".
If you pile all the small risks onto a single entity,
then, by-and-by, it is sure to happen, sooner or later,
that the entity itself will collapse.
By smoothing out the little bumps, you ensure that the big bumps will be total calamities.
No one can eliminate risk in this world and only fools try.

I hired my ex-girlfriend's boyfriend (and now common-law husband)
to install the wood furnace for me
(I took care of procuring it myself,
I had to,
because there is only one factory in the country that makes them
and I was able to find out that they have a huge backlog.
I found one, gathering dust in a tractor shop in the styx,
and I immediately went and got it).

He called all the HVAC places in the yellow pages.
They all wanted to sell me heat pumps.
Other than that, they would not take the job,
either because it was too small or because it wasn't heat pumps.
He finally found a duct man who knew what he was doing, who wanted to moonlight.
The man is good and he is almost finished. He does nice, careful work
and good planning.
but yesterday,
his assistant quit.

Why?
Because the assistant was angry that he was not getting $500 for 24 hours of labor.

excuse me?
That's as much as I am paid for what I do!!!!

When people start to collect unemployment,
they tend not to look very hard for work.
They aren't serious about it.
They are not hungry.
Even, some of them won't moonlight for cash.
Extending their benefits leads them to believe
that they can go on watching tv all day forever.

Besides, it does not take too long before they begin to lose their skills,
forget how to do the jobs they knew how to do before.
They get fat and lazy.

things are going downhill fast. very fast.