It's fine to want to earn more money as long as you don't do this by taking away other people's freedoms. No one has the right to use force on others for their own ends. No one has the right to take away other people's right to contract in order to maintain an above-market price. So for example: the minimum wage takes away the rights of employers and would-be employees to contract at low wages in order to allow some workers to charge above-market wages. Taxi medallions take away the rights of passengers and drivers to contract for cheap fares in order to allow taxi companies to charge above-market fares. Not only are such laws economically wasteful, but they are immoral in the same sense that slavery is immoral: they take away one's freedom to contract.
Are you also against big government taking away our freedom to keep the entire proceeds of those contracts, in the form of taxes, which it then redistributes to the poor?
You know, so that despite having a job paying $0.50/hr, people can still afford to buy enough food to eat for themselves, and so they can afford to live somewhere heated in the winter?
Or are you fully behind an individual's right to die of starvation and/or hypothermia, because if they really cared about living, they'd... uh... ummm... shit - what is it they'd do again?
Out of curiosity, are you and 99% of the people you know relatively well off, and not in forseeable danger of running out of food or warmth any time in the next decade or so? Do you, as the saying goes, got yours?
I got mine, but I am somewhat concerned about the other people in my community who don't. I don't want to step over their bodies, rather, I'd like to help them get out of the pit they're in - however they got there. Be that being born into poverty, or falling into a career 20 years ago which has since been automated away, or through illness, or just bad bloody luck. So I'll give to charity and food banks, but I'd rather that people could get jobs which pay well enough that they don't need to use 'em.
As for the people that got theirs but are content to say "fuck you Jack" to those that don't, they're not the kind of people I want to share my community, or country, with.
> I am somewhat concerned about the other people in my community who don't [have theirs].
If you're concerned about people in your community who are poor, why do you oppose letting them make employment contracts which will make them better off? The minimum wage makes it illegal for them to contract for jobs that they are actually qualified for, i.e., very low-paying jobs.
Very low-paying jobs are for employment what remedial courses are for college education. Eliminating remedial courses in college which would mean that people with very low levels of education could not get started with college. The minimum wage, by eliminating low-paying jobs, prevents low-skilled people from getting started with employment.
> As for the people that got theirs but are content to say "fuck you Jack" to those that don't, they're not the kind of people I want to share my community, or country, with.
Not only are you against allowing people to contract, you also want to deport people who exercise their right to speak. This is not a cheap shot. When you are willing to violate a basic human right like the freedom to contract, you're likely morally blind enough to be willing to violate other human rights.
The choice of violating the right to contract and trade or letting someone starve is a false one. In fact, a major cause (though not the only cause) of poverty is restrictions on contracts and trade, mostly by governments. There are examples of this everywhere. The article mentioned taxis. Driving a car safely is a basic skill that many otherwise unskilled people can do. Taxis should be very cheap, plentiful, and temporary job for people who need something to do while they work on doing something more useful. Instead, government restricts the supply of taxis making taxis expensive and relatively scarce. This hurts people who need transportation, it hurts people who would like to provide transportation but cannot, and it hurts people who could be doing something more useful for society but don't because they are earning more than they should as taxi drivers.
"why do you oppose letting them make employment contracts which will make them better off?"
I would argue that those contracts do not make those people better off. People want to work, want to be productive, want to feel like they're not taking charity to feed themselves. So they'll take 3 jobs and try to survive on 5 hours sleep a night to do that, running their health into the ground, because employers will gladly take advantage of people's need to feel productive, while setting them all against each other to drive wages as low as the most desperate person to work will accept.
"The minimum wage, by eliminating low-paying jobs, prevents low-skilled people from getting started with employment."
Huh? First, minimum-wage jobs generally are "low-paying, low-skilled" jobs. Are you saying that restaurants would prefer to employ a new dish-washer at $7.25/hr if they'd previously been... catching rats bare-handed for $2/hr? Also, how do you account for the fact that low-skilled people manage to find low-paying jobs in countries that have better minimum wages than the US?
"Not only are you against allowing people to contract, you also want to deport people who exercise their right to speak. This is not a cheap shot."
Um, yes, it is.
"When you are willing to violate a basic human right like the freedom to contract, you're likely morally blind enough to be willing to violate other human rights."
Such as, the freedom to contract yourself into slavery? Or the freedom to contact buying food and/or medicine from a supplier who has not been subjected to any FDA checks because they assure you that you can trust them that they don't need any of that gub'mint interferin'?
The US already puts limits on the kinds of contacts that people can enter into, especially with large corporations, because they realise that there is a great imbalance at work. Corporations have a lot of incentive to fuck people over if they can get away with it, and a highly concentrated amount of expertise, time, and effort to put into doing their best to make that happen. While individuals are often inexpert in many fields, and do not have the time - even if they have relevant expertise - to push back against every corporation they deal with day-to-day, and the effort they expend doing so is disproportionate to the amount of benefit they personally will receive. Individuals' efforts are diffuse compared to those of a company, even more so when compared to the efforts of many companies trying to accomplish a goal together, like drive wages down.
The US also even has limits on speech, where speech can cause an immediate and direct threat to the safety of others.
I would argue that it is not moral blindness to limit the rights of some, where the exercise of those rights affects the wellbeing of others. Yes, limiting rights is dangerous, but I would argue that that simply means that it needs to be done carefully, in persuit of a specific goal, and only as much as appears to be necessary to achieve that goal - with the acknowledgement that it not be done at all if the goal appears unattainable; not that is must not be done ever.
No-one's rights are absolute, they always start get fuzzy when the exercise thereof starts to interfere with the wellbeing of others. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose.
"Instead, government restricts the supply of taxis making taxis expensive and relatively scarce."
> employers will gladly take advantage of people's need to feel productive, while setting them all against each other to drive wages as low as the most desperate person to work will accept.
By this logic, all wages should be at the minimum wage, because without government setting a lower bound, employers would just keep setting employees against each other and thus drive wages lower. Why then do some people earn more than the minimum wage? Do they work for companies that do not try select the most profitable workers?
Don't employers also have to compete with each other for the best workers?
Don't workers too have the opportunity to choose among competing employers?
> Such as, the freedom to contract yourself into slavery?
People choose to enslave themselves all the time, just not to employers. The most common slave-masters today are alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and other vices.
The argument being made is that employers have a lot more market power in the employment market than potential employees. Employers have capital, they have inertia so they can absorb a lot more risk. There are fewer employers than employees so it is easy for them to form a cartel or engage in price fixing. This especially goes for low end jobs, where a small number of large corporations make up much of the retail and fast food market. Unemployed individuals are under a lot of pressure to find employment quickly, and they know there is a lot of competition. So, employers can set wages artificially low. This power is not absolute, which explains why not every job is at minimum wage. However, this is an observable effect. The gap between rich and poor is ever widening, the middle class is eroding away, yet all the while production has been increasing. Wages are being driven down artificially low.
I wanted to ask "where does it all end?" but then I realised from the rest of your comment, you actually seem okay with slavery. Which is odd really, because you argue about human rights, but the right to freedom of movement is actually a far more fundamental and clear cut human right than the right to form contracts and do trade. In fact, if your ideals about the right to form contracts result in other people losing their right to freedom of movement, then that's a clear sign that you have lost your way.
The "gap" between the rich and poor is a function of possible productivity. As it becomes possible for people to do more, there will be more of a spread between people who do nothing and people who max out their potential. When all farmers worked farmed by hand, the "gap" between the lazy and the industrious was a few bushels of food. But now that there are tractors and financing available, the top farmers produce maybe thousands of times more than the little farmers.
The situation is similar in every field, especially those involving mass distributions. An interesting youtube video can get millions of times more views than an ordinary video. Is this a problem? Should we force people to watch uninteresting videos, or cap the interesting videos to reduce the viewing gap?
I don't see why increased productivity should be a concern, especially since being productive today generally means imparting benefits to large numbers of people. Larry Page is very rich, but he got that way by helping everybody with an internet connection to find useful information.
> . . . the middle class is eroding away, yet all the while production has been increasing. Wages are being driven down artificially low.
I don't understand what you mean by "artificially low" wages. Wages are generally set by supply and demand. As long as people are free to choose alternatives, they are not working for artificially low wages. An example of people with artificially low wages are prisoners who must take the work offered to them by prison officials. But the majority of people are not in prison.
> you actually seem okay with slavery
I'm all for stamping out slavery where it is committed by one person against another. No one should take away another's right to contract. But where a person voluntarily degrades himself, I see that as his choice, not mine.
> the right to freedom of movement is actually a far more fundamental and clear cut human right than the right to form contracts and do trade.
I agree that freedom of movement is a fundamental right. I'm not sure if it's more important that the right to contract or trade. I think it's less fundamental because there are a few situations where you could legitimately not have freedom of movement (while traveling in an airplane or trespassing), but I can think of very few situations where you wouldn't have the right to contract. (You might have contracted away your right to make future contracts for a limited time and subject-matter.)
"By this logic, all wages should be at the minimum wage..."
No, just the wages for "low-skilled" jobs. As strange as it may seem, people with a valuable skill are in a much better position to get companies to compete with each other for the best workers.
"The most common slave-masters today are alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and other vices."
Yes, and most countries realise that addiction to such things is a terrible public health issue, and in most cases try really hard to support people in breaking free of those chains.
Note that we've tried making such things illegal to protect people from themselves (Prohibition in the US, global War on Drugs.) but in that case it demonstrably hasn't worked, and has done more harm than good. The same cannot be said for minimum wages, which have been instituted by many countries around the world, and has failed to measurably harm the economies of any of them.
Slavery is immoral because it takes away freedom of movement (and is thus a form of imprisonment), not freedom to create contracts. There are no fundamentally fixed moral rights relating to trade because there is no universal objective notion of property. Property is an entirely social concept and can only exist through social contract. You only "own" an object to the extent that everyone else agrees you do.
Most people want there to be regulation of business, even if some of it is corrupt and inefficient. Most people want governments to collect taxes and control shared resources, even if this is inefficient and wasteful. These things are seen as a necessary evil. If it's what the public want, then it's not immoral, because the entire notion of property (and by extension trade) only exists as a social contract.
To go into detail for your taxi example, the roads were built as part of a social contract where people pay taxes under the expectation that the government will execute some form of transport policy. Tax payers would have anticipated some form of taxi regulation to occur over future roads. For most people this is desirable because they want to be protected as consumers. If you take away taxi regulation, then you are not honouring the implicit contract that allowed for the creation of the roads.
You may personally disagree with this widespread desire for regulation. It is also reasonable to say that corrupt and inefficient regulation is immoral. However I think it is quite dangerous to argue that regulation itself is fundamentally immoral. The history of the industrial revolution shows what kinds of contracts ordinary people will willingly subject themselves to if they feel they have to.
> Slavery is immoral because it takes away freedom of movement . . .
Here's a counter-example: the difference between a freeman farmer and a slave farmer is not that they don't have freedome of movement, but that the freeman has the right to sell the harvest to whom he wants while the slave does not.
It sounds like the definition of slavery as lack of freedom of movement was dreamed up by some law professor in order to avoid having to characterize the income tax as a form of slavery.
Reminds me of the definition of pornography: you know it when you see it. Or Plato's man: an upright biped without feathers. Somebody plucked a chicken and said "Plato's man!". So he added "with broad nails".
Any time you try to create a minimal taxonomy you get into games like this. No malicious intent by theoretical law professors need be imagined.
A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more, otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.
Oh, I'm sorry, I got that totally wrong. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations.
