Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

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At some point we have to decide whether the purpose of society is to promote the general welfare of all citizens or just to give capitalists the opportunity to make as much money as they can. I don't see anything wrong with worker protections. The capitalists have plenty of protections like patents and copyrights.

I agree. As indicated below; the way you phrased it comes off very partisan. I infer I have the opposite bias; but still agree. This law is flexible. It is for larger company's; presents the choice to the worker and seems to have reasonable adjustments for both parties.

I think protecting workers is good but top down absolutism isn't. From what I can tell based on the article this seems to be a measured response to the issue taking the middle ground

I see the issue of peoples' time being taken advantage of in the public sector, too, which I would argue is not necessarily capitalism. A good example is a teacher, or professor, or researcher--someone who is either salaried or paid for a set number of hours, but has expectations far outside a normal 40 hour work week. The larger government system dictates that person cannot be compensated more than a certain amount, yet that person could not hold their job if they only put in that set amount of time.

All property law, basically.

Indeed. It's no accident that the Libertarian outlook puts so much stock in property law and very little in labour law, it's an outflow of the Powell Memorandum. When you have much property to lose you seek to protect it, but when your only property is your labour then Libertarianism can't do much for you.

Excellent point. I have yet to hear a meaningful reply to the argument that 'the American free enterprise system' implicitly depends on having a whole continent's worth of resources to exploit at the outset.

Libertarianism would be a lot easier to take seriously if it banned inheritance or something to prevent the accumulation of resources that could be handed to others, which is at odds with the whole notion of meritocracy. Libertarians do make some effort to speak up for open labor markets and abolition of borders, but I can't think of any libertarians leading the charge for immigration reform offhand.

> I don't see anything wrong with worker protections

As long as people can opt-out then it's fine. Otherwise I think there is something wrong with it: if two consenting adults want to send work emails to each other after 5pm what business is that of yours?

two consenting adults

Bait-and-switch alert! Most economic relations are not between 'two consenting adults' of equal economic power engaged in equitable contractual arrangements for mutual advantage.

If people can opt out, then this gives the opportunity for the business owner to make opting out a requirement to get the job. Then you may as well not have the protection at all. You can't opt out of:

- minimum wages

- OSHA

- discrimination protection

- etc.

There's no special reason why you should be able to opt out of this work hour regulation. Now if the regulation is overall a bad idea, that's a separate question.

Yes it's a fundamental philosophical problem isn't it. Protecting people by taking away their freedoms. A tricky balance and you can see how people come down on either side of it.

Bullshit. 'Taking away their freedom's is an extremely inaccurate characterization of employment regulation. The reality is trying to protect employees by taking away the freedom of employers to exploit them. You're trying to shift the loss of freedom onto employees, and effectively saying they're losing the right to enter into bad deals out of short-term necessity - the old fallacy of the rich as well as the poor being 'free' to sleep under bridges while ignoring the fact that virtually nobody chooses to do that if they have other options available.

It's protecting the commons. As an individual it might make sense for me to opt out of those regulations because I can get a job easier or command a higher wage. This only works if most people follow the regulations. The problem is when companies make opting out a de facto part of the deal and then individuals are no longer getting a benefit from their choices but are forced into it

Yes I think I'd agree in practice. I was really replying to the 'nothing wrong with it' assertion. I think there is something fundamentally wrong with it and we should acknowledge we're taking away people's freedom, but it's probably an acceptable trade-off in practice.

Well we'll place you on the defeatist side. Please stand down then when the rest of us try to argue for progress by enshrining new rights and not tossing them up in the air.

No I'm the optimist! I hope people can be left to work out their own arrangements amicably. But accept we aren't there yet so support a little nudge here and there. You're the defeatist - assuming they can't and stepping in to force them to do it your way instead.

Work out own arrangements indeed. That's what the infuriating "Right-to-Know" laws are for. You have as an employee the right to know about the hazards of the chemicals you are working with. But you do not have a right to proper safety equipment or training. It's enshrining a race to the bottom that does nothing to improve workplace safety.

Oh and you can opt out of OSHA and minimum wages - by joining the military (Executive Order 12196).

I suppose that it makes sense that the only employer in the country that needs to be able to (legally) routinely put its "employees" in mortal peril would have a carve-out from the health and safety regulations.

Never thought about it that way. The problem is that the military has socialized medicine so it's not good for libertarians either.

An exception that proves a rule if ever there were one.

> As long as people can opt-out then it's fine.

Not quite. If people can opt-out, then the ones that have little leverage against their (potential) employer -- precisely the ones that need this protection the most -- will be screwed over.

Where should be the line drawn on what two consenting adults agree to? Also, is "consent" and "adult" actually well defined?

> Where should be the line drawn on what two consenting adults agree to?

It seems to me the line of what you allow people to consent to should probably be pretty far beyond 'reading an email'! But yes it's fundamentally problematic issue of how we choose to run a society.

That so much a loaded partisan view of the world...

The citizens are capitalists: they are (almost) all looking to put their saving where the interest rate is the highest, they would (almost) all protect their private property and seek to increase their own capital, and is anyone seriously considering that the government should run the means of production?

Workers protection need some balance: pushed to the extreme it leads to competitive loss. The "general welfare" of all citizens does not means you have to push the cursor all the way: France switched to 35h weekly legal a few years back, but why not 30h? Or 20h? That would surely improve the happiness of workers! What about PTO? Legally entitled to 5 weeks currently in France, why not double it? Etc...

No, it's absolute truth. Workers in generally are simply incapable of owning means of production beyond very small businesses, and their participation of the market as stockholders is minimal and comes with near-zero ability to influence the companies for which they might be shareholders.

Capital should be at the service of society, not the other way around. We know that we can have perfectly functional societies where wealth is distributed more evenly and less work is done at the lower end of the pyramid at essentially no disadvantages in quality of life for anyone involved.

What is "absolute truth" here? The manichean opposition that is proposed between "promote the general welfare of all citizens" and "give capitalists the opportunity to make as much money as they can"?

This is what I was addressing and I'm still considering as a very manipulating rhetoric that does not leave any place for nuance and balance.

The nuance and balance exists in the practice of states with maker-driven capitalist economies that still make an effort to capture and funnel a part of profits to the benefits of the participants of society regardless of their position in the market.

On the contrary, it's a vocal minority of libertarians that want to insist that benefits to capitalists are indispensable to the welfare of the rest.

"Workers protection need some balance"

Exactly. Balance is the keyword. The last decades have shifted this balance towards capital owners and the Trump administration is trying to do even more.

"France switched to 35h weekly legal a few years back, but why not 30h? Or 20h? "

You could ask the same questions the other way: "Corporate tax to 0%? Dividend taxed at 0%? Patents and copyrights never expire?"

The "economy" is not a natural law like gravity but human created. We can decide where the balance should be.

Savings come from income. Savings are a small fraction of income:

http://www.financialsamurai.com/the-average-savings-rates-by...

Apart from housing, many people have remarkably little savings. In the UK, there are all sorts of schemes to make people become capitalists like this with their pensions, but I'm not sure if their hearts are really in it. And I think most people are smart enough to realise that cutting their income but boosting savings rates by a tiny fraction is going to result in a smaller savings pile and a worse life in the meantime.

I don't want to be a capitalist and to spend all my waking hours wondering if I'm competing as effectively as possible against every other micro-capitalist out there.

I mean, I have a life plan that involves accumulating sufficient capital to provide approximate financial security, but that's just a fancy way of saying I hope to put together enough to stop worrying about it. What I actually want is somewhere to live and work in modest comfort free of distractions, and to able to travel and visit interesting places at regular intervals.

I like making art for art's sake (as opposed to commercial design or monetizable brand creation etc.). I'm not super-talented or super-skilled, I just have an overriding compulsion to produce things that are aesthetically pleasing to me. It might even be a form of brain damage, because this compulsion hasn't done me much economic good but it still takes priority over other activities. I have absolutely no desire to get rich off it, just not to be poor. Realistically, if my work does have art value in the eyes of others most of that is likely to accrue to the work long after I am dead, like this Basquiat that someone decided to park $110 million in yesterday: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/arts/jean-michel-basquiat...

Being in a constant state of financial anxiety/arousal is not freedom.

The capitalists would be in trouble if everybody wanted to be capitalist. We also need people who do the actual work and want to do it well. Capitalists and workers need each other and should respect each other.

I don't buy into this capitalist/worker distinction either, which is just a fancy name for wage slavery.

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