Comment by 2038AD | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 2038AD | Hacker News Reader

Chomsky: Just think about it for a minute: almost everybody spends most of their life living in a totalitarian system. It's called having a job. When you have a job, you're under total control of the masters of the enterprise. They determine what you wear, when you go to the bathroom, what you do – the very idea of a wage contract is selling yourself into servitude. These are private governments. They're more totalitarian than governments are.

Interviewer: but they can't legally murder you or... [imprison you]

Chomsky: They can't legally murder you but they can control everything that you do.

Interviewer: Well, again, the right-wing libertarian argument will be "well, you're free to leave at any time".

Chomsky: Yes, you're free to starve, that's exactly right. You have a choice between starving or selling yourself into tyranny. Very libertarian. The right-wing libertarians, whatever they believe, are actually deep authoritarians. They're calling for the subordination to private tyrannies, the worst kind of tyrannies.

Seems to ignore the idea of competition between companies to provide good working conditions and pay in a free labor market. The choice isn't between staying and being abused or starving. The choice is between a variety of employers offering a range of working conditions and a range of pay and benefits.

Chomsky's take is interesting because it makes you think about it in a different way than you might normally but as a practical matter I don't think his take reflects reality at least not in the US.

> competition between companies to provide good working conditions and pay in a free labor market

Sure - but we could live in an alternative universe where Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, and all the other billionaires conspired to drive down their workers salaries. Where Eric Schmidt sent e-mails instructing they be deleted as they pointed to an illegal cabal crushing wage competition between companies.

Of course - this alternative universe to yours is the one we actually do live in.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/jobs-and-schmidts-gentleme...

That isn't so true of the bottom of the job market or places outside of high-tech. Most call centers aren't competing for anything and they treat their employees like cattle. Things like random drug testing to enforce your compliance after-hours and outside the workplace. Dress-code to enforce uniformity. Zero tolerance for dissension or disagreement with managers (e.g. Insubordination) regardless of merit. I think this is largely because they are bureaucracies and require absolute rigid compliance from its constituents in order to function.

"The purpose of a bureaucracy is to save the time of a competent person. Put another way: to save time, some competent people will create a system that is meant to do exactly what they want — nothing more and nothing less. In particular, it’s necessary to create a bureaucracy when you are both (a) trying to do something that you do not have the capacity to do on your own, and (b) unable to find a competent, aligned person to handle the project for you. Bureaucracies ameliorate the problem of talent and alignment scarcity." [0](https://blog.usejournal.com/how-to-use-bureaucracies-97e9805...)

After being poor for several years I realized something.

People like Chomsky have never been in a situation where they were starving. He is clueless as to what this is really like. Only an out of touch wealthy person would say such ridiculous things. Or a child whose parents take care of their basic survival needs.

Survival takes work. Always has. Always will. Food and shelter will never be magically provided to everyone. Someone somewhere has to grow the food, harvest the food, hunt the food, prepare the food, store the food, preserve the food, harvest building materials, manufacture building materials, assemble building materials, maintain buildings, clean buildings, etc. Or if we're talking about AI robot utopian future, someone has to build and maintain the robots, and prevent them from making humanity obsolete.

If you don't want to work for another human then you have to work for yourself at the whims of nature.

If you expect other people to give you food and shelter to you for free, then you are expecting other people to be slaves for you.

The parent is a transcription of the video, and I think it should be pinned to the top of the thread.

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