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

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

Adrian Tymes wrote:
> individuals
>
>
> --- 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...

### If you have a sufficiently inflated ego, indeed there will be a lot of
perfectly honest and profitable jobs you won't take, as being below your
dignity. Well, this problem certainly doesn't need to be addressed by
throwing money at it. Just the opposite.

---------------------------------

>
> 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).

### Impossible in a free market. Only possible in a land-owner oligarchy (or
a state-controlled economy) - but for the prevention of that you don't need
minimum wage laws, but rather taxation of land ownership. You don't deal
with a feudal system (which you described above) by wage laws but by
limiting land ownership.

Marx said exactly what you did - that the end-point of capitalism is
concentrated ownership of capital with only essentials being offered to the
working class.

Boy, was he wrong.

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  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.

### This caused *capitalist* bourgeois revolutions against landowners. In
situations closer to a free market affluence for everybody who wishes to
work is the rule, and revolutions would be a quaint memory.

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  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.

### Minimum wage laws do not help anybody except the bureaucrats who
invented them. They do not limit inequality, they do not prevent the
formation of monopolies, they are a pure and unmitigated disaster.

Rafal