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You can make more money as a contractor. The deal is contractors get paid more to take in the risk of being fired. If you are ok with this, you get as liquid money the cash that would have gone to benefits.

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.

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There's only a very small group of workers like in it who could benefit from being a contractor. But there is a vast number of lowly paid workers who are devestated because they can't get benefits. How do we trade off these things?

My answer is to allow the market to float with as little regulation as possible. What perverse incentives exist due to regulatory externalities?

> allow the market to float with as little regulation as possible

That sounds like a recipe for a race to the bottom that ends in Dickensian sweatshops.

I don’t think so. Denmark or Sweden lacks a minimum wage. People are free to not work with Uber. They are free to work with them. If there is labor that will accept Uber’s terms, let them. Allow competition. Remove the regulations around taxis having medallions that cost 100k.

> My answer is to allow the market to float with as little regulation as possible. [...] Denmark or Sweden

When I think of markets with "as little regulation as possible", Denmark and Sweden don't really cross my mind...

They have high taxes instead of regulations. In USA companies are forced to provide all of these benefits to its employees, in Sweden you pay taxes and the government provides them instead. The end result is that companies has to do less and workers don't have to worry about companies trying to trick them into not getting those benefits.

No min wage can make sense without a good social safety net. The us doesn't really have anything like those other countries.

In favour of the vast number of low-paid workers who could really use decent employment benefits.

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.

You shouldn’t pervert justice just because someone is poor. If you’re ok with not following justice, but rather an emotional sense of vengeance, then why allow income at all? Let the state provide the needs and have the citizens provide the ability? At some point you either have to admit that you’re ok with theft by the state for the greater good or that you have created some arbitrary line in the sand where theft is not linger okay. The second option is hypocritical, but own that too.

> At some point you either have to admit [...] or that you have created some arbitrary line in the sand

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.

I actually want to see most of the lines you cite removed. Property lines are not arbitrary they are contractual. Now where the ruling body politic set those contractual lines might be arbitrary but that is beside the point.

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.

Equivalently those people on average salaries will tend to think one shouldn't pervert justice to cater for people like us on well above average incomes.

"I might go from making an absurd amount of money to making a slightly less absurd amount of money."

Cry me a river. There are tech workers barely getting by because they're being forced into being considered "contractors".

You have designated yourself as a moral authority by sheer force of your existence. I simply explained the benefit and risks of being a contractor. You have decided that I should not be allowed to sell my labor at a rate I and my client accepts.

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