I am really really afraid this will make governments consider IT contractors employees. I hate this.
I've probably got the details wrong but that's the general idea.
So I bill for about 200k USD. My wife gets our medical insurance. I take home about 140k after taxes. If I were an employee, I’d only take home 100k after taxes.
If the trade-off is that the IT guy billing six-figure sums ends up with a bit less cash in his pocket, because he's required to contribute more to the system that takes care of everyone, well... I won't be losing any sleep over that.
Life in a society is full of arbitrary lines in the sand. When is a person allowed to drink alcohol? Where does your lot of land end and your neighbor's begin? How fast are you allowed to drive on this particular piece of road? Why do you consider the tax rate, of all things, to be so arbitrary?
For a functional society, you have to draw the line somewhere. Ideology instead of pragmatism is a recipe for failure. Being pragmatic is not hypocritical.
You’ve constructed a straw man. You say your view is practical and mine is idealistic. I say yours is idealistic and mine is practical because mine will allow people to practice more freely.
That sounds like a recipe for a race to the bottom that ends in Dickensian sweatshops.
When I think of markets with "as little regulation as possible", Denmark and Sweden don't really cross my mind...
Cry me a river. There are tech workers barely getting by because they're being forced into being considered "contractors".
Most places that force these kind of treatments tends to do so only when people have no ability to set their schedule or no realistic prospect of negotiating terms etc. in ways that makes them indistinguishable from employees.
Most of the time there are ways out of this and/or all that ends up being required is for you to be an employee of your own company rather than exploit tax loopholes that were never intended to be used this way. Eg. this is the case in the UK where the dreaded IR35 closed tax loopholes that let people avoid paying themselves a salary for their contracting and instead cut costs by taking out dividends or making their spouses directors etc.. The change did not in any way stop contracting even for a single client, but it prevented people from using it as a way of avoiding tax.
In most of those instances "forcing you pay for things you're not interested in" boils down to not forcing society to take risks on your behalf because people are using contracting as a means to avoid e.g. social service payments and the like.
I'm sure there are places that are exceptions where some people get caught out, and that's a shame, but most of the time these rules benefit far more people, because of the extensive use of "contracting" as a way for employers to get out of obligations with people who have no effective leverage.
If I was to be an employee, I would (or rather, my employer) be forced to do everything based on the employment law, which has severe restrictions on me as well as on my employer and on the kind of relationship we have, which causes extreme loses to me (as I like to be paid proportionally to returns) + paying more for things I don't want and up until now wasn't required to have.