My friend used to use this argument when I complained that Uber / Deliveroo were a bag of crap. I didn´t have a great counterargument, I just mumbled something about workers rights.
What is a convincing argument that this line of thinking is wrong?
What is a convincing argument that this line of thinking is wrong?
If I lay a trap, and you fall into it, and I offer to release you if you give me your bank details, are you free?
If it's a disaster and I charge $10000 for a bottle of clean water, are you free?
If a society requires you to work in order to live but only offers you poor options for work, are you free?
We generally talk as though, as long as there is no specific person intentionally coercing you, you're free to choose. But those particular elements don't actually make much difference to your freedom. It seems to me that being set up with only unfavorable options is different from being really free to choose.
Who would say that someone using a gun to coerce you is free?
It seems to me that invalidating the notion of freedom might not be what you set out to do. Instead, you're trying to make a point wherein people are only truly free if they have some options that are favorable. Do I interpret you correctly?
In that case, what's "favorable"? Who defines and judges such things? What standards are used? I know people who are capable and skilled and thus offered highly remunerative positions that they don't want to take because of who is hiring - is that favorable or unfavorable? Reasonable arguments for both spring readily to mind. Are we to use an individual's personal preferences only?
> If I put a gun to your head and say "Your wallet or your life," are you free?
No -- the subject is you and your gun, if you remove them the situation improves.
> If I lay a trap, and you fall into it, and I offer to release you if you give me your bank details, are you free?
No -- the subject is your trap, if you remove it the situation improves.
> If it's a disaster and I charge $10000 for a bottle of clean water, are you free?
Yes -- while there is a subject (you), removing it will not make situation any better at all.
> If a society requires you to work in order to live but only offers you poor options for work, are you free?
Depends?
In USSR, with exit visas and "social parasitism" laws, no. Agent is state, and removing will make a situation better -- yes, you would still be hungry, but at least they would not arrest you, and you could try your luck in another country.
In USA, mostly yes. There is nothing you can remove to get better options for work, or to allow living without work. There are some exceptions -- like anti-vagrnacy laws and job licensing -- but they do not affect most people.
I join in the argument that labor is coerced into participating in the free market in the US. The agent/subject that you're missing is the government and their enforcement of laws pertaining to property.
I would argue that labor is only as free as the social net for unemployed is strong. The coercion comes from the fact that your landlord can have the sheriff evict you (or your bank can foreclose and do the same) and the place where you help yourself to food without paying can have the police arrest you. Likewise if you try to oppose that physically, or, say, gain employment by selling illicit drugs, there's a system already in place to confine you to a jail or prison.
You're arguing that labor is only free so long as it can hold a gun to someone else's head (the evil 10%) and force them to support said labor via welfare by taking the fruits of the labor that the 10% produce. As though one has an inherent right to someone else's very life and property (if you did, you wouldn't need a gun to steal that property). Communism, because it has worked out so well over the last century.
It's a contradiction. You're actually saying some people get to be 'free' using coercion and overt threats of force, by enslaving other people to fulfill their needs via welfare transfers based on the taxation of other better off persons income.
The system of welfare transfers, much less actual Socialism, requires extreme force to be applied at all times to keep the system functioning, as such there can be no freedom at all - there's always a gun pointed at your head.
The whole prerequisite of welfare is to take excess resources to redistribute.
Now who decides what is excess? Definitely not the person who has it and is greedy. So or societies have decided that majority or representative of the majority decided this. Reasonably equitable system, but not exactly colouring or incorruptible.
I don't think free markets exist, I believe they are an idealized model. I think this is especially true for the labor market.
Likewise, I don't believe there are coersion-free societies. But that does not mean I'm willing to overlook some baseline level of coersion as not being coersion at all. Governments (regardless of economic policy) tend to assert a monopoly on the use of violence in an area, and that monopoly on violence means their policies are enforced through coersion.
But If you say that property laws are coercion, you cannot then say that social net for unemployment helps one be free. The coercion agents are still out there, waiting for you.
After all, you were not not free in USSR even if you had a job - freedom is about possibilities.
But more broadly… it depends whether someone is a dogmatic free-marketer fundamentalist or just someone who was swayed by the arguments from that dogma. For the fundamentalists, forget it.
For those actually open-minded, take the scientific argument. Start with confirming agreement that you're both pro-social instead of anti-social (you both actually want what maximizes overall flourishing and well-being and don't prioritize some other value or dogma). Then get them to acknowledge that the free-market argument is a model that needs to be backed by empirical evidence to be accepted as actually describing reality instead of being just an untested hypothesis.
If you can get them to thus at least accept that understanding the complex factors in play is daunting and we can't just take an elementary principle and blindly apply it to any situation conclusively… well, then you can have a discussion with them over the next couple years about behavioral economics, psychology, culture, power…
My general go-to is emphasizing that employer power comes largely from being organized. It's not like each interviewer completely makes their own decision about hiring anyone with no rules or restrictions from the company (unless the interviewer is a sole-proprietor themselves hiring one other employee or contractor). The power in the corporation comes specifically from the organized structure of the company. The individuals on the other side of a contract are divided. They use things like unions and government to have power in solidarity, and without that, they can never have comparable power in negotiations.
So, either we accept the impulse for workers to build organizations or use government for solidarity or we insist that companies shouldn't exist either and need to just be free-market masses of independent actors too or we drop the pretense that we're describing some sort of equal-enough, voluntary free-market negotiation.
Good luck!
You have a dogma yourself. that's ok, just be aware that you have one, and are espousing one.
> "Then get them to acknowledge that the free-market argument is a model that needs to be backed by empirical evidence to be accepted as actually describing reality instead of being just an untested hypothesis."
The free market is one of the most tested ideas out there.
> "They use things like unions and government to have power in solidarity, and without that, they can never have comparable power in negotiations."
law is really important for most forms of economic systems to work. I think the fact that social media and perception drivings things so much could have a positive outcome in this area. Companies should see the welfare of their employees as an important role in making the world 'better'.
I see a lot of tech companies saying they want to make the world a better place, yet for instance, they have abysmal 401k matching plans. melinials are not saving enough for retirement, and that bad behavior in tech is not helping the future crisis. I wish a tech company would decide to be a true leader on this
Education, Infrastructure, Military, etc.
All socialistic enterprises funded by the general fund.
Free enterprise does not work without a socialistic framework to support it.
For a pure unregulated free market see Ethiopia.
Its not ironic, the requirement is called rule of law, and its a foundational stone from the philosophers that brought that royalty and religion from the State. The recognition of private property has been recognized as a necessity from the get go in classical philosophy and economics.
> Odd as it may sound, full time jobs are essentially what cause involuntary unemployment because you are not market testing your position on a daily basis.
Sure, it might decrease labor flexibility which can increase unemployment, but how big an effect can that actually be? And what is the proposed solution to fix that if its an actual problem?
> The gig economy is an attempt to deskill...
The gig economy is not de-skilling workers, its consuming the labor of unskilled workers because the price-ratio works. Those very same companies pay 6 figure salaries to a lot of people, that provide utility to the company as well. Neither by design, or in theory, do companies increase their profits by reducing the skill of their labor, they do it by increasing their productivity.
I see a tenuous relationship with the reserve army concept of Marx trying to be used here, but I'm not buying it.
If we want the nuclear power of capitalism without the boom, we need to engineer an appropriate containment vessel.
Ethiopa is one of the places I most want to visit before I get too old.
Even Somalia, the market is affected greatly by the military context of what's going on. It's got less centralized control, but it's not an actual free market entirely. A true free market as a complete overall social system is probably just a fantasy idea.
I completely deny this. I am anti-dogma and presume at this point that you are either just lumping me in with dogmatic people who say things that my points remind you of or that you are otherwise misinterpreting me.
What's my dogma? Are you just conflating "dogma" with things like "bias" and "perspective" because I certainly have those, I'm just one person and not omniscient.
> The free market is one of the most tested ideas out there.
The free-market as a MODEL is well-tested and understood. There are cases where reality fits the model pretty well, but they are isolated. The vast majority of reality is far enough from the free-market model that it's impossible to use reality as a test of "the free market" because most markets in reality aren't fully free.
I suspect you're equating "market" with "free market". All the complex parameters of pricing, supply-and-demand, basic market economics… that's all present in most markets, free or non-free. It's not like when there are regulations or power imbalances, cartels etc. etc. that all of market economics disappears. But there's so rarely any example of completely free market to even study, we can't accurately accept that it's well-tested.
We can't study free-markets in a lab the way we can study basic physics or cell biology or whatever.
Besides, the vast majority of economics as a field has been practiced in ways that are nowhere near the scientific rigor of many other fields.
> [your last two paragraphs]
I'm not sure I follow the relevance here. Are you assuming that you're talking to some dogmatic ideologue such that the plain things you state which seem sensible enough is a counter to anything I think or wrote?
We're all trading time and willpower for money. If the gig economy has a poor ROI, people can end up in poverty traps - stuck working a couple shitty jobs because they need the money to survive, but the jobs consume so much time/will-power that they can't pursue alternatives.
This becomes a huge issue for Uber-style companies where workers buy their own tools (cars), in exchange for uncertain per-trip wages with no benefits. They're called "contractors", but realistically what can they do if Uber "fires" them? Work for Lyft? Same shit, different logo.
Uber's practices are outright deceptive - they compare very optimistic ridesharing wages to hourly employee wages, without considering their car ownership/fuel/taxes/maintenance/insurance costs. I did some napkin math a while back which suggested quite a few drivers are actually losing money in the long-run (primarily maintenance and lower auto resale value).
Your actual post is mostly reasonable arguments, but this premise is not realistic. This is stretching the word 'coerced' to the point where it doesn't mean anything. The fact that resources are limited and we need the average person to add about as much value as they consume is not coercion. It is a (very sad) fact. There is no element of force involved except maybe the enforcement of property rights, which is one of the most reasonable things we ask our governments to undertake.
> They're called "contractors", but realistically what can they do if Uber "fires" them? Work for Lyft? Same shit, different logo.
Are these people born with "only allowed to work as a car driver" stamped on their forehead? If the market rate driving cars is so terrible, they need to find a different industry. The difficulties of moving between industries are real, I'll acknowledge them and say maybe there is a role for the government to facilitate this aspect. However, as a practical point, I don't think governments generally do. When we as a society decide who is responsible for employees moving between industries, we basically have to choose between this being the employers problem, this being the individuals problem or this being someone else's problem. I'm very happy to contend that, even though it is not very fair, the person who has the most control is the individual and they are the only one who is ultimately responsible for themselves.
There are a lot of problems with companies like Uber. The car drivers are clearly employees in every way except technicalities, and the practice of making them bring their own tools is reprehensible. But it is by far better to try and solve that problem by encouraging the growth of better alternatives than by dropping the hammer of regulation. When they regulated the taxi industries, my memory is in a lot of major areas the actual taxi drivers didn't end up benefiting and random licensed taxi owners did. Depends on the country and city.
Did you see what I said about poverty traps? Once someone is stuck, it's very challenging to break out without outside help.
> The difficulties of moving between industries are real, I'll acknowledge them and say maybe there is a role for the government to facilitate this aspect. However, as a practical point, I don't think governments generally do. When we as a society decide who is responsible for employees moving between industries, we basically have to choose between this being the employers problem, this being the individuals problem or this being someone else's problem. I'm very happy to contend that, even though it is not very fair, the person who has the most control is the individual and they are the only one who is ultimately responsible for themselves.
Personally, I'd like to see free or heavily subsidized public adult education. There is no need to regulate unethical employment practices when laborers have the freedom to seek employment elsewhere - the market can sort it out. But we need freedom of horizontal movement first.
And yet even in the supposedly so competitive SV tech market, abusive practices like forcing employees to sign arbitration agreements, at-will employment (can be dismissed with zero notice or severance and for no or any reason not prohibited by law), "unlimited" vacation that is really meant to discourage you from taking it, and long workweeks with no overtime pay are common.
Who doesn't get to deal with any of the above? Union employees (for the most part).
We need to agree on where the poverty traps come from first to then reason if government is the solution.
I think this probably does happen, but I'd be interested to know how many people are stuck in debt because they bought a product using a financial product they didn't understand vs it just happened.
This thread has a bunch of stuff about these potentially mis-sold financial products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14476381
Essentially firms only hire if they can make a profit, where has an individual has to get hired to eat and have a sense of long-term usefulness in society.
Uber's market is a market, but it's certainly not a free market.
Plenty of people take that freedom as an axiomatic, inviolable good or right, but reasonable people can have different values.
Some people believe that those freedoms are necessarily a net win for the economy, but that's a pretty shallow argument too.
Maybe workers' rights are a race to the bottom, a tragedy of the commons -- perhaps some small amount of regulation would be good for business and for workers, by forcing companies to spend a small amount more to get a more sustainable workforce without giving up advantages to competitors.
Obviously these freedoms and protections exist on a continuum. We've mostly come down on the side of minimum wages, which is a compromise on those fundamental, absolute freedoms -- in a sense all "workers rights" are curtailments of "jobseekers rights".