Hacker News Reader

Comment by scotttrinh | Hacker News Reader

I, for one, am divided on issues like this and all of the other social issues of our time. In my world-view, the cause is the state (don't take that to mean society, I mean literally the state apparatus) so all of these state-sponsored fixes amount to mitigation strategies at best, not solutions.

Even having said that, mitigation is better than continued suffering. To illustrate my point with an extreme example: making it illegal to kill your slave doesn't solve the underlying slavery issue, but hopefully it would stop some slaves from getting murdered, in the meantime.

There is an inherent danger in trying to work within the system to fix it, but we're talking about real people's lives.

I think it's still an open question whether or not raising the minimum wage is the best way to mitigate the problems of the working poor, but I don't think the sky will fall if we get it wrong–it's already wrong, amirite?

View on HN

A much better, but politically impossible, solution is basic income. Minimum wage is basically a tax on companies that employ low skill workers to those workers.

There are several problems with this. Why tax only companies that hire lots of workers, regardless of how profitable they are? It punishes those businesses and discourages hiring low skill workers. It also only benefits only those workers and not the unemployed or poor in general.

Basic income taxes all businesses fairly, spreads the benefits fairly, and doesn't create bad incentives. But unfortunately it will always be unpopular on both the left and right. To the right it's socialism. And the left will complain about <Big Business> that isn't paying their employees "fairly" and offloading the cost to the government.

> In my world-view, the cause is the state

What does this even mean?

> To illustrate my point with an extreme example: making it illegal to kill your slave doesn't solve the underlying slavery issue, but hopefully it would stop some slaves from getting murdered, in the meantime.

The state outlawed slavery.

I thought the same thing. Private industry made slavery. It took the state to put an end to those abuses.

And the state is also trying to put an end to wage slavery abuses.

But most rebublicans appear to be ok with getting paid nothing and working slave hours.

So I'm happy to let them elect conservatives that cut labor laws, and lower minimum wage.

A nice cheap unregulated labor force in the heartland America will lower my cost of goods and shipping on the coast.

Republicans are like a voluntary slave force for the liberal coasts.

I'm not sure why you think that, but private industry did not make slavery in America. Large royal charters and monopolies granted by the crown created huge estates and large tracts of low value farmland that could only become valuable by the use of slave labor. Sure, it was private individuals who were granted this favor and given access to cheap forms of labor, but it was not a natural outgrowth of private industry. At best it was unfortunate side-effect of the state's benevolence, and at worst, a conspiracy by the state to create wealth at the expense of an exploited class of people.

At any rate, I think you misunderstand my stance, I'm not looking to cut labor laws or lower minimum wage. I'm looking to free the worker from the shackles of the system that the state has created for them. In the meantime, if we're looking to ease the pain and suffering of those forced to live and die in that system, I think we should consider it, but think long and hard about how and if it will actually bring relief, or will it have unforeseen consequences that will make the situation even worse? That's what we should focus on.

BTW, definitely not a republican, so I think the rest of your comment can be fairly ignored by me. :)

You're kind of agreeing with my point here. I'm saying that tempering evil with the state is a legitimate use of the state apparatus. That shouldn't be construed as thinking that the state can actually fix the underlying cause (abolition did not fix the problem of Race in America for instance), but it can mitigate the suffering of some, and shouldn't be totally discounted.

Beyond that, from my perspective, slavery in America was ended despite the best efforts of the government to keep it going. It's probably just semantic differences between us that make this non-obvious, but I would argue that the state made it harder to eradicate slavery than if it wouldn't have existed, or was less all-powerful. At least in North America, slavery was a result of state-sponsored colonization and state-granted charters and monopolies, not private industry. The history of British colonization of North America is not a history of private social movements, but of politics and the expansion of Empire across the globe.

At the base of this disagreement, I feel it is a mistake to conflate law with the state, and that conflation is the reason we see the state as a benefactor or positive force in the world. Because they force their own monopoly in law, they are seen as being the same as law, but law has existed and still exists outside of the modern state.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com