Economically wealthy but time poor --> customer
Economically poor but time rich --> servant
Serfdom 2.0 Ladies and Gentlemen
Economically poor but time rich --> servant
Serfdom 2.0 Ladies and Gentlemen
Remember kids, like Adam Smith said: in an efficient and competitive market, the price of a good or service falls to the cost of production.
If you believe him, what does that mean for labor?
It means you are fairly compensated for your work and you pay fair prices for the product of other people's work.
I'm not talking about fairness in terms of equality. People are not equal in terms of economic value they never will be. Indeed, some people have no better choice than accept a job that pays less than a living wage. Would you deny them that possibility by mandating that every job needs to pay a living wage? Isn't that unfair?
There's this lovely fiction in law that contracts should be upheld because two consenting parties both get ahead by reaching a bargain. All transactions are positive, so we should uphold bargains as a default. Super duper.
But then history gave us a ton of examples of contracts which are negotiated in the context of a power or informational asymmetry. Boo.
Contracts for labour are predominantly contracts which are negotiated in the context of power and informational asymmetries, which is why developed nations have backstopping legislation to prevent wholesale abuse.
I guess your original statement being untenable forced you to redefine fair to mean 'whatever they agreed to' which is tautological. Yes, the agreements will be what was agreed to, but does that actually address the post you were replying to?
If there's a power difference to the point of coercion, it's coercion and one party is not consenting. Otherwise, it's still fair. Of course a company is "more powerful" than an individual. Still, a company cannot coerce you into working for them specifically.
As for informational asymmetry, that is part of trade. The time you spend on getting quotes is opportunity cost. It goes both ways, too. If you're selling labor, your employer has no way of knowing whether you're as competent or productive as you appear. There's nothing inherently unfair here.
Of course, there's a point at which informational asymmetry turns to outright fraud. Again, at that point there is no real consent.
> Contracts for labour are predominantly contracts which are negotiated in the context of power and informational asymmetries, which is why developed nations have backstopping legislation to prevent wholesale abuse.
Such as? Last I checked, nothing stops me from offering cheap junk for a ridiculous sum of money, nor is there a law preventing me from attempting to hire workers well below market rate.
There are some political attempts at price fixing (such as minimum wage), but they generally don't work. They're either so loose as to have practically no effect or they cause shortages/unemployment.
Yes, coercion and fraud are bad, but you'll note that you're indicating that the quality of consent appears to be on a sliding scale from 'we're reaching a real agreement between well informed equals that stand to benefit from a transaction' to 'an unsophisticated economically distressed person is forced into taking a poisoned deal'.
Yes, the law recognizes that not everyone is sitting firmly on the 'ideal contract' side of things, which is why in areas where there are systematic issues, it modifies the way the contracts work.
>Such as? Last I checked, nothing stops me from offering cheap junk for a ridiculous sum of money, nor is there a law preventing me from attempting to hire workers well below market rate.
Perhaps you don't believe labour standards, collective bargaining rules, minimum wage, and other pro-worker laws exist, but they do.
If you want to know more about the specific frameworks that exist in your jurisdiction, you can just look up any employment law digest that covers your area. If you're an employer most jurisdictions have 'employer community' circulars that contain employment law related briefs in a short newsletter format that tell you things like "Don't sexually abuse your workers" and "Don't let your workers collect evidence that you pinch secretary ass regularly".
In fact, if you're in the civilian legal world, the entire field of nominate contracts is essentially the legal community fixing systemic problems associated with different fields of contract, one by one.
Maybe you hate labour laws specifically, and want to ignore the idea that 'contracts as an idea can be gamed'. Take a look at the SEC, then. They perform the exact same function, but for wealthy investors. Do you hate them too? Are you upset you can't release yet another vaporware ICO to fleece a few hundred crypto hopefuls? I really hope not.
Forced by what? By their personal situation? Even in this case, both sides stand to benefit. Any better hypothetical deal simply isn't on the table. That person still has the choice not to take the deal or to try and find another deal.
> Perhaps you don't believe labour standards, collective bargaining rules, minimum wage, and other pro-worker laws exist, but they do.
Indeed, there is always and at any time a great deal of lawmaking and lobbying underway to regulate things that presumably need regulation. This in itself is not proof that the market mechanism needs such regulation.
I already dealt with minimum wage, it's price fixing and it doesn't work.
Collective bargaining (like any bargaining) requires no laws, it is a natural right. You are right insofar as that there are some anti-discrimination laws in place presumably protecting union workers.
Safety standards are an interesting topic. Last I heard, there's no law forcing employers to publish statistics on accidents, to properly inform the laborer on the risk they are taking. They're expected to trust "safety standards" set by the government and (presumably) checked by the government. Yet they fully bear the risk of their job. They are responsible for themselves. They can and must refuse to perform an action that they deem is endangering themselves unduly.
In any event, you are dragging in a lot of stuff that goes beyond "a trade" and into labor law. Labor isn't "one transaction" that could be deemed fair or unfair. The terms are re-evaluated constantly and if there is a disagreement, either parties can terminate.
> Take a look at the SEC, then. They perform the exact same function, but for wealthy investors. Do you hate them too?
You can drop your "hate" allegations, please. Insofar as we are talking about regulating fraud, it is fine. Insofar as we are talking about being the nanny for foolish investors to not make foolish investments, it is unwarranted.
>Collective bargaining (like any bargaining) requires no laws, it is a natural right.
No it isn't, because absent laws people tend to do things like break your knees with a lead pipe if you're a union organizer.
Which happened in the states. All the time. Until the union organizers hired the mob to defend them, resulting in the teamsters running a number of unions like a racket.
No thanks. I don't like any of that.
>Safety standards are an interesting topic. Last I heard, there's no law forcing employers to publish statistics on accidents, to properly inform the laborer on the risk they are taking. They're expected to trust "safety standards" set by the government and (presumably) checked by the government. Yet they fully bear the risk of their job. They are responsible for themselves. They can and must refuse to perform an action that they deem is endangering themselves unduly.
1) Who are "They"? 2) So you agree there's an informational asymmetry, but you put the burden on the weaker party in the transaction to be responsible for the calculation of the costs and effects of it (despite agreeing they don't know as much about it). 3) You should look up OSHA. Lol.
Are we starting to understand how that allocation of responsibilities, along the axis of 'who has power here', results in sub-optimal procedures for mitigating risk? Or did you expect everyone who works in a factory to have a triple PhD in materials engineering, industrial chemical design and ergonomics, so that when a piece of warehouse scaffolding is stressed because it is loaded past it's specs, they can diagnose the defect through examined differences in metal spalling patterns, then inform their employer and not be censured for the act (because, remember, according to you we shouldn't have labour standards).
Again, no thank you. I'd rather have society put together so that people don't need to be an expert in every safety critical expertise in order to avoid harm from others.
I agree.
> No it isn't, because absent laws people tend to do things like break your knees with a lead pipe if you're a union organizer.
You keep dragging things out further and further. Am I led to believe that without laws supporting unions, breaking knees suddenly becomes legal?
> So you agree there's an informational asymmetry, but you put the burden on the weaker party in the transaction to be responsible for the calculation of the costs and effects of it (despite agreeing they don't know as much about it)
I'm not putting the burden on them. The burden is on them, as a pure matter of fact. Every worker is ultimately responsible for the risk they put upon themselves. If they get injured or killed, they are the ones harmed. They're the ones who have to make the call.
Of course an employer that hides information on safety hazards or is otherwise negligent is liable for endangering others.
None of this is specific to trade. You're talking about fraud, coercion and extortion and all kinds of things. It's going nowhere. Of course nobody willfully "consents" to being endangered, defrauded or extorted.
> Again, no thank you. I'd rather have society put together so that people don't need to be an expert in every safety critical expertise in order to avoid harm from others.
You arguing against straw man libertarian, not me.
Your statements regarding legal responsibility, which is what you were critiquing (remember we're talking about contracts!), are all VERY wrong. But a lay person strolling through the thread wouldn't know it, so maybe your argument seems plausible. Half the time, though, you're not making a 'legal responsibility' argument but rather a 'moral responsibility' argument. The is/ought dichotomy exists, and is a common place where people get tripped up when discussing law.
The rest of the discussion isn't really worth having given that core miscommunication. That said...
>You arguing against straw man libertarian, not me.
You literally doubled down on the same position for three paragraphs in the very same post. lol
Can you accept that words don't all have one meaning? Maybe you willfully misunderstand what people are saying so that you can win a debate that you started, on your terms? I don't care about "winning" a debate with you. Nobody else is reading this, it's just you and me.
> Your statements regarding legal responsibility...
See, I never made a statement about legal responsibility. You want to talk about legality and law and power and justice and morality. I'm talking about fair market prices.
Of course "fair market prices" aren't going to be "fair" at every possible level of analysis, under every moral framework, in every single instance in the history of mankind.
For you, it's all power games and injustice and exploitation. For me, it's people cooperating voluntarily without centralized control. In my eyes, it all works pretty well. In your eyes, it doesn't and it all needs regulation and intervention. We're not convincing each other otherwise.
But then history gave us a ton of examples of contracts which are negotiated in the context of a power or informational asymmetry …
No two people or entities possess the exact same information. You don’t define how you’re using power. Every transaction can be said to have these asymmetries, a tautological characterization that happens to be a bogeyman from cultural Marxism.
Voluntarily agreed contracts, in contrast, are a distinct and thus helpful category. Seeing as much does require the realization that some contracts’ terms are rejected and consequently never become agreements.
Basic contract theory requires A. A is not always true. Accordingly, we modulate applying basic contract theory on the basis of how true A is. When A is not true, we don't apply it.
This applies in respect of large M&A deals as well as in respect of labour law. Making transactions work better requires us to understand when transactions work well and when they don't.
Though the wealth of a country should be very great, yet if it has been long stationary, we must not expect to find the wages of labour very high in it. The funds destined for the payment of wages, the revenue and stock of its inhabitants, may be of the greatest extent; but if they have continued for several centuries of the same, or very nearly of the same extent, the number of labourers employed every year could easily supply, and even more than supply, the number wanted the following year. There could seldom be any scarcity of hands, nor could the masters be obliged to bid against one another in order to get them. The hands, on the contrary, would, in this case, naturally multiply beyond their employment. There would be a constant scarcity of employment, and the labourers would be obliged to bid against one another in order to get it. If in such a country the wages of labour had ever been more than sufficient to maintain the labourer, and to enable him to bring up a family, the competition of the labourers and the interest of the masters would soon reduce them to this lowest rate which is consistent with common humanity....
But it would be otherwise in a country where the funds destined for the maintenance of labour were sensibly decaying. Every year the demand for servants and labourers would, in all the different classes of employments, be less than it had been the year before. Many who had been bred in the superior classes, not being able to find employment in their own business, would be glad to seek it in the lowest. The lowest class being not only overstocked with its own workmen, but with the overflowings of all the other classes, the competition for employment would be so great in it, as to reduce the wages of labour to the most miserable and scanty subsistence of the labourer. Many would not be able to find employment even upon these hard terms, but would either starve, or be driven to seek a subsistence either by begging, or by the perpetration perhaps of the greatest enormities. Want, famine, and mortality would immediately prevail in that class, and from thence extend themselves to all the superior classes....
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...
A fair price doesn't imply "good" or "enough to live off". Ultimately, only so many people can live off a finite amount of land. The amount of labor regulates itself as well (i.e. less children are born).
A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...
Smith also writes at length of the power imbalance between business owners and employers, who can and do collude to keep down labour wages, whilst labour has far less power (and in his time, no legal right) to organise to raise them. Of the inherent inequality and dangers of piecework pay. And of the differential returns to various economic goods and activities, particularly wages, commodities, rents, interest, assets (to Smith, gold and silver), and public goods. More recent economic understanding is that the marginal cost / marginal price, and differential risk / consequence dynamics of such interactions provide distinct behaviours and advantages to specific powers. The inherent imbalance between wages (tending to subsitence, or below) and rents (tending to all consumer surplus for the producer), create an inherent conflict.
Then there are the problems of corporate ownership and behaviour (roundly criticised by Smith in the form of join stock companies), the corporatisation of violence ("Regulated companies, it was observed by Sir Josiah Child, though they had frequently supported public ministers, had never maintained any forts or garrisons in the countries to which they traded; whereas joint stock companies frequently had", and general collusion of commercial interests against those of the common weal.
The passage I'd previously cited ties wages largely to economic growth, stagnation, or decline, and the story it paints is both stark and well worth consideration.
I'm well aware that Smith on occasion argues for protectionism to "smooth out" that extinction process. That's welfare. It has no bearing on fair prices in free trade.
Which is a great deal of what Smith discusses.
And no, it's not welfare. It's balancing political power.
Because, "Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power."
(Yeah, Smith again.)
These are orthogonal. A fair market price simply isn't equal to the price that is required to sustain someone's living. A fair market price also is not equal to the price that could be paid (i.e. the "resources available").
The laborer whose price is raised to some arbitrary limit that is above the market rate will find demand for their labor disappear in equal measure.
... does not exist.
And the market, and economy, should serve the people. Not the people the market.
"POLITICAL œconomy, considered as a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator, proposes two distinct objects: first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services. It proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign."
Again: Smith.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/smith-an-inquiry-into-the...
> And the market, and economy, should serve the people. Not the people the market.
This is a meaningless slogan. The market is the people. Demand reflects what people need. Supply reflects what people have to offer. Prices reflect their agreement.
Because it doesn't.
But today we have below replacement fertility in the West- finally some progress!