Only a moron would conclude that shifting money around outside of the free market (robbing Peter to pay Paul) is conducive to growing the economy.
Paying someone to dig a useless hole, then pay another person to fill it up doesn’t create wealth, it’s an illusion of “job creation” translating => into building an economy.
Asylum questions
This morning’s Aamulehti leads with a report that claims last autumn’s influx of asylum seekers is continuing to keep people employed in Finland. The country’s six interview centres, where applicants must go to be questioned by asylum officials who will decide on their claim, employ 80-100 people each, the paper says.
The reporter questions an Immigration Service official about why asylum seekers have to travel sometimes long distances in order to reach an interview, to which the answer is that it is a more efficient use of public resources for the claimants themselves to travel to appointments than for the officials to spend their time touring the country.
In response to the paper’s query about why a town the size of Tampere doesn’t have its own interview centre, even though there are 1,500 asylum seekers in the region still waiting for their claims to be processed, the official promises that Tampere will be first on the list if a new wave of arrivals this autumn makes it necessary to open a new regional office.
