It feels quite icky to do this, but it is necessary when making policy decisions.
Every day, governments and corporations decide to spend (or not spend) X amount of dollars to save Y number of lives. Does it make sense to spend some money on infant mortality prevention, vs research on cancer types that only really old people get? What about seatbelt laws? Or pollution prevention?
Ideally, we would rationally spend our limited money on providing the best life for the most people. Not that this actually happens for a variety of reasons.
If we are to get the best value for our money, then we need to assign a value to human life in terms similar to disability-adjusted life years (DALY):
https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr...
Notice the comment being objected to was "is the night watchman's life worth 3.2 million"
On top of that, making healthcare decisions based on future income goes straight against ethical guidelines. By your logic people unable to work due to disability, age or serving a life sentence would be denied any healthcare.
It's only punishment, there is no correction at all.
> if by any study it costs nearly 40,000 dollars to house a prisoner for one (1) year, was the night watchmans life truly worth 3.2 million dollars of Connecticut taxpayers money?
Can we please not value people's life in money? Because if we can then slavery would be justified.
> what meaningful value was extracted from his slave labor? was it enough to offset even a fraction of the internment cost?
Ditto.