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Comment by rhaps0dy | Hacker News Reader

>Many people think that a country is better off if its workers are decently paid, do not work excessively long hours, and work in a safe environment. (If you are sufficiently right wing, then you may disagree, but that just means that you will need other examples to illustrate the abstract principle.)

Would it be possible to resist stabs at the "other side" of politics, if you are trying to explain something? People in the other side will be distracted by this, and think less of the author, or (like me) think it's a misguided or untrue example.

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I don't think this is misguided at all. I've heard right-wing people say work hours should be an employee-employer agreement that shouldn't concern the government. The author argues, quite civically in my opinion, that one can disagree with this particular example but that shouldn't interfere with the main point.

It's misguided because it's an uncharitable strawman of the right-wing position. It implies that people on the right think that workers should "work excessively long hours." But people on the right would instead say that workers should be free to work more or fewer hours depending on their personal situation.

So only poor people should work excessively long ours, then.

Hey look, another strawman!

As this is in fact a consequence of the proposition if you also consider market pressure and power imbalance between employee and employer, I don't think it's a strawman. But of course there can be other, more positive consequences too.

Why High Earners Work Longer Hours

"Between 1979 and 2002, the frequency of long work hours increased by 14.4 percentage points among the top quintile of wage earners, but fell by 6.7 percentage points in the lowest quintile."

http://www.nber.org/digest/jul06/w11895.html

I think what OP is getting at is that you can drop the "if you are [side of the political spectrum]-leaning, then..." clause and lose nothing substantive from the argument. It's there exclusively to poke at the opposition while adding nothing of value.

It also doesn't help that he sets the tone of the article by patting himself on the back about how modern and sophisticated he is, with a bilingual family of academics that are citizens of the world.

It's only back-patting if you take it that way. Is he supposed to deny his own personal circumstances, or the notion that they'll have an effect on his outlook? Of course things like that shape the way you're likely to view the world, and surely it's best to be upfront about it. To my ears, it didn't come across as boastful at all.

> I've heard right-wing people say work hours should be an employee-employer agreement that shouldn't concern the government.

That sounds like more of a hardcore libertarian position, which doesn't really fit neatly into the left-right dichotomy in my opinion.

It's certainly possible, but it requires sufficient empathy and intellectual openness to study and understand the arguments of the "other side", which seems lacking on all sides of late.

I think he was actually picking things it's hard for anyone to disagree with, but if you do disagree with them you probably aren't on the "left".

I think a right wing argument would not be against these things, but that while these three things are good, government regulation, welfare, and other typical left-wing policies are not the best way to achieve them.

How is it a "stab" to say that different examples might be needed?

I don't think the quote from the article is such a fair representation of what is probably meant by "right wing" (a quite ill-defined term, in my opinion) here:

I do not think it is part of any "right wing" ideology that workers should not be decently paid, should not work excessively long hours or should work in an unsafe environment, which is what the author is implying.

Instead, the "right wing" idea is that by mandating those things through government intervention, you will not achieve your goal of actually securing them. Securing a decent work environment and pay requires a wealthy economy, which can be harmed by (wrong, excessive, etc.) government intervention. So, in the long term, you are actually more likely to end up with decently paid and successful workers if you keep out and let the "invisible hand" do its work.

I think this argument has a lot of truth in it but also agree with the author that if taken to its extreme (which "sufficiently right wing" would imply, I guess) there is not much evidence of it actually working (as is true for most theories, by the way). I think that this is what the author meant, but the way he wrote it does sound like a "stab".

"I do not think it is part of any "right wing" ideology that workers should not be decently paid, should not work excessively long hours or should work in an unsafe environment, which is what the author is implying."

Furthermore, I'd point out that if this is your model of the "opposition", for any given value of "opposition" (right wing, left wing, the people in your office who disagree about what coffee we should have, whatever), that they just hate people and want to hurt them, you are being played. People who tell you those things about the opposition are at the very least wrong and at worst, lying. You should consider looking into why.

Or, put another way, the belief that the other side (again, regardless of who it is) is full of bad people with actively bad motives who just want to hurt and destroy and are being uniquely selfish, that is proof positive you are in a bad filter bubble.

> Instead, the "right wing" idea is that by mandating those things through government intervention, you will not achieve your goal of actually securing them.

That is more an American definition of right wing as far as I know.

Traditional European right wing (sufficiently right wing) is usually very interventionist, the economical policies generally goes from an interventionist left, to an economically liberal center, to an interventionist right, with both far left and far right advocating nationalisation of (some) private companies.

While true in a tautological sense, it's snark.

I didn't read it that way, but fair enough - could have been written better.

Not sure what "stab" you are referring to here? Seems like a fair remark to me.

Which did you think it was (misguided or untrue) and why?

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