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Comment by ericd | Hacker News Reader

Sorry small businesses have apparently been so cruel to you, I've had great luck with them.

I've been lucky as well and all of my small business experience personally has been great (tech small businesses are pretty good on average, I think) but my point is that luck, by definition, doesn't happen to everybody and we shouldn't have to rely on it. "I got lucky therefore there is no problem" is not a reasonable position to take.

When you say we shouldn't have to rely on luck, do you mean in terms of not being harassed, or more generally? Because if you mean more generally, I don't know how you do that without severely curtailing people's freedoms.

Well yes of course, we should curtail the freedoms of bosses to be abusive, steal wages, and generally behave horribly to his or her employees in the same we curtail the freedoms of a physically large man to physically assault others.

And even if that isn't okay for you, there are plenty of ways to do this without even curtailing anyone's "freedoms" to be abusive: we can provide government jobs to all workers if they want them and require managers at government run institutions behave decently, for example, as we did in the New Deal.

Those are what I meant by harass. We already do, there are a number of laws on the books that address those things. That said, the legal system could certainly be made more accessible.

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