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.

  • 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.

  • Say 12.5% of our population is in the militia = 672,500 brave souls

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.