[extropy-chat] The liberty-responsability pressure on individuals

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal at smigrodzki.org> wrote:
> This
> means that it is essentially
> impossible for a reasonably nice able-bodied person
> to be unemployed against
> his will (unless the  state intervenes to prohibit
> butlers at below the
> so-called "minimum wage").

Error: you forget that people place a certain value on
their own wages.  Below a certain wage point, there is
no difference to people between a pittance and
nothing.  But that's not the most severe factor you're
ignoring...

It has come to pass in the past that a few people who
owned most of the resources wound up controlling the
available jobs, and would only pay the minimum
essentials (food, housing, et cetera).  This prevented
those without the wealth from advancing, which
resulted in an intolerable situation.  Bloody
revolutions, specifically - a major waste of resources
all around, save that it did make much more resources
available to the poor than would voluntarily be made
available.  The minimum wage law is there to prevent
this kind of inefficiency from arising again, by
design or by accident.  Perhaps it does result in its
own inefficiencies, but one would need to come up with
an alternate way of preventing this effect before any
proposal to repeal the minimum wage law could be taken
seriously.