Are you arguing that all labor laws, workplace safety laws, minimum wage laws, anti-compete laws and so on should be repealed? After all, they all get in the way of two consenting parties deciding to work together. If not then it's merely a question of where the line is drawn and that's a murky issue.
There are many cases to be made against minimum wage laws and anti-compete laws.
A laws designed to affect everyone but instead has hundreds of exemptions carved out has no place existing.
I will freely admit my bias: I have been very poor before and I lean towards protections for the most vulnerable in our society at the expense that some people will have to sacrifice somewhat between Uber and their other gig.
Poverty is terrible, and I agree it should be dealt with. But how has this law helped? Uber and Lyft are more than willing to leave all of California rather than stay and deal with the regulation. They’ve made that clear. It’s more economical for them for halt business in California rather than adhere to the regulations. That’s a rather poor incentive set for on behalf of the California regulators. Regulations don’t exist in a vacuum.
Ok. And why is that bad? The office work / engineers will stay. If there's need for transport, the drivers will work for transport in other ways. If nobody wants to pay for better conditions of drivers, then we just exposed the VC funding as unsustainable in a long run - it would happen sooner or later.
So no, I don't think it is.
This is going to happen one way or another.
Like I mentioned in the post above, regulations don’t exist in a vacuum, just because you say something should be a certain way doesn’t mean it will be. There are costs, and Uber and Lyft have determined that it’s not economically feasible for them keep operating in California under those regulations.
If we’re ok with California regulators dictating what jobs should exist regardless of what the market can support, then this is the result.
I'm down.
I never really understand some arguments with people who think most regulation is bad and not voted in blood.
I don’t see how that would help the poor. Fighting poverty is done by giving the impoverished more opportunities, not less.
Simply put, regulating all jobs to pay a livable wage won’t make those jobs suddenly do so. It will instead make those jobs disappear, as the employer no longer making any money.
That's demonstrably not true as written. UK requires paying over living wage at 25yo and minimum wage before. The low-skilled jobs have not disappeared.
But think about what it really means as you wrote it: you don't think people doing low skill work deserve to not live in poverty. That is what living wage means. If we can't afford people to earn living wage as a default, it's a problem with general economy that needs to be addressed - if killing jobs that can't afford workers is a first step, it will have to happen at some point. (Ideally we'd have a different approach, maybe a UBI, or another highway network project, or something else)
This is a nicely worded "let them fight for scraps" when contrasted with the idea of living wage. This is the hill I'm willing to die on. A job opportunity under living wage may help separate people survive today, but it's a terrible idea for everyone long term.
At any point Vietnam or Cambodia could mandate that all jobs must pay US or Europe level wages. But doing so would not be an instant shortcut to people actually making those wages and being a developed country. If it really was that simple at least one country in the world would have used that trick.
Certainly some economic arguments can be disingenuous (some of the promises around tax cuts come to mind). But some arguments around which policies are effective are reasonable and I think the minimum wage issue is one of them.
I think the idea behind high minimum wages actually is to create more good jobs, by squeezing business that employ minimum wage workers and hoping that they can cut profits and/or raise prices (and if they raise prices, that it doesn't reduce their customers too much and cause them to lay people off or go under).
An alternative is wage supports like the earned income tax credit, where instead of squeezing businesses that employ minimum wage workers specifically you just tax everybody, and use that to artificially boost up the income of low wage workers. This has less risk of forcing low-income people into unemployment than raising the minimum wage and can provide them the same income, at the expense of high-income people having to pay more taxes.
Another alternative is trying to drive down unemployment super low, so businesses have trouble finding people and actually need to start bidding up wages to get anyone. This will cause businesses that can't afford higher wages to close, but that doesn't cause unemployment because those employees have moved on already. A labor shortage also makes it easy to find a job and employers can't be too picky (helping people fresh out of college, etc). This seems like the most ideal scenario but also the least straightforward to get via policy.
IMO living wage is an important goal but there are reasonable criticisms about strategy (1) compared to the others (especially wage supports which provides the same immediate benefit without risking forcing people out of a job).
Politicians, political interests, corruption, graft and many other factors influence legislation and most regulation has not had the intended consequences, often creating more problems than it solves.
Do you know that's the case, or do you just mean "that's what they said!" It's in their interest to say they just can't afford to treat their workers better- that they'll be forced to shut down- regardless of whether or not they can afford to.
Remember, there's a history of just this kind of stunt with these particular actors. So, personally, I'm very wary of taking their statements at face value!
And yet, here we are, years later, with the 40 hour work week and companies somehow successfully surviving.
But we did ensure that workers at the low end aren't allowed the same flexibility as the higher paid employees, along with a nice demeaning time clock to punch every day.
That’s what they did with AB5, and also decided to regulate lucrative freelance gigs while they were at it. The result however wasn’t that companies hired former contractors as employees; no they just farm all their freelance work to out of state freelancers.
Is it your contention that taxi's didn't exist pre-Uber? Or that Taxi's weren't jobs done by ordinary people?
I can tell you as someone who is over 40, I would regularly form relationships with Taxi drivers so that I could simply call them up and ask them if they'd be available on X day, X time, and if they could use the "special" rate, and the answer was yes. Where special rate meant paying just them and not the taxi company I met them through.
There is nothing special about Uber or Lyft, and if they leave California the existing Taxi company's will fill in the gap.
Pretty sure that is illegal, if not it is unethical
> if they leave California the existing Taxi company's will fill in the gap.
Clearly there was a demand for something other than taxi's, while you seemed to like it, and did unethical things to get your rate lower. For most people they found the taxi service to be unappealing and over priced, Thus uber and lyft where born
The point is that that if Uber goes away, it won't stop people from paying for rides.
It's a bit like claiming if Hershey's claimed that people would stop eating chocolate if they couldn't abuse their relationship with local governments to get water rights they have no business having.
Noooooooo, people will still like Chocolate, it's just that more "moral" companies will replace them.
If anything, the value of chocolate will go up and that's perfectly acceptable.
It will stop some people, The number of people that use Uber and Lyft massively exceeds the number of people that used Taxis before them
There is a reason for this, and if your solution is well people will just use taxis" clearly that was not the case.
>>If anything, the value of chocolate will go up and that's perfectly acceptable
I see you are speaking from a position of Wealth Privilege..
I wonder if you would feel the same if that price increase was in something less of luxury good like Wheat or corn where a price increase would be counted in lives not dollars
Oh nooo!?!?! How dare I hire that blogger directly, I'll go to jail/be fined for not going through a hiring agency!?!?!
You realize that stupid opinions exist, right?
Does the blogger have an exclusive agreement with the agency?
Is the blogger using agency resources to complete your work?
The blogger had to be scouted by the agency, which used agency resources, therefore the blogger is totally liable for that risk!!!!!oneoneoneneoneshiftoneshiftoneshiftoneshiftone.
--
Imagine a world in which the risk is taken on by yourself and not others... but of course that's totes not possibru...
Given that Uber adjusted their platform to adhere to the ABC test in jurisdictions where the justice system upheld the law, I doubt that they'll leave.
If they were to leave, though, that would be a good thing. There are dozens of companies that do follow the law and do pay their taxes that are champing at the bit to eat Uber's lunch.
The key was they were LOWER COST than a taxi, if everyone had to be full employee's with all of the costs that entils it is likely the fare will be at or higher than taxis,
And given there would be less competition between drivers, the service would also drop
It would just be a taxi service which was universally hated as too expensive with poor service.
AFAIK in mature markets they made a profit
However, I think that trying to place market restrictions on two parties making an agreement is not the right way to go about it.
If we had a stronger social safety net (either something like a UBI, or some other form of economic assistance), we wouldn’t need to try to manipulate the market with blunt restrictions on trade.
There are a LOT of things a market economy is bad at, or simply won’t address... externalities, extreme poverty, taking care of people who don’t produce something that the market will pay for, etc.
Attempting to force a market to address these issues by passing blunt laws is extremely inefficient. If we want to support poor people (which I want to do), we should tax everyone and pay to support them. Then we can let the market do it’s thing and set prices and wages and contracts without having to guess at what policies will force the market to fix the issue we see (without also causing unintended consequences like we see here)
The company will be around next month if they don't contract you. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you may not be. Thus, you're not meeting on a level playing field and these rules are built to prevent you being taken advantage of.
This is particularly relevant to Uber drivers, as driving for Uber is unskilled labor. It's not you freelancing as a $200-500/hr software engineer. After all if you are, you can just incorporate a contracting business and pay yourself benefits out of the take -- then this whole conversations is moot.
> If we had a stronger social safety net (either something like a UBI, or some other form of economic assistance), we wouldn’t need to try to manipulate the market with blunt restrictions on trade.
This is my free-market argument for UBI and socialized medicine also. I believe UBI and socialized medicine promote, not detract from a true, a free-market economy.
Being effectively prohibited from working on my own terms - even if the best terms I can negotiate are poor - doesn't give me any power.
It makes me a subject to the crappy welfare system, which now has far more power over me than any employer would have ever had.
The majority of people, who happen to have a job, who don't want to pay for people who do not have a job, but who also have no interest in more competition from the bottom, are effectively in control of the welfare system, immigration law, and many other regulations that prevent people from exercising their right to work. It's a racket.
No, it isn't. Every citizen has the same share of ownership and control as every other. One person, one vote and all that.
It is rather apparent that some people - and certainly some groups - have a lot more power than others in any country. Voting just means the power is a little more mobile, and can shift over time.
1 randomly selected citizen has, practically speaking, no ownership or control of the welfare system.
This also provides a reasonable explanation for why existing policies are so ineffective -- politicians still want your vote (5% is 5%), but they also don't want to lose the votes of the other 95%, so if they can convince the 5% that they're getting something when they're really getting nothing (or worse than nothing), they get elected again.
Also I’d argue that even if technically everyone only gets one vote, some people exert much more control than that by influencing voters, politicians, etc, through their wealth or other sources of power.
A new worker classification between contractor and employee would be a real solution, but a real solution was not the goal of this legislation.
People need to eat and have housing. Some folks have to pay child support or risk going to court. Some folks have to pay for medicine or risk dying.
You really aren't free to work or leave until we have the choice to work. An actual choice - as in, me, an able-bodied human, can decide to just stay home and make artwork (without selling). And I wish folks would stop pretending this isn't the case. So long as we have poverty and poor folks that are just-over-poverty, we have people that can be exploited.
That's where we are at, and the laws keep the exploitation from going further: Without those laws, what is to stop folks from doing such things? The market doesn't correct for it - if it did, we'd see better wages now.
A low-wage worker is basically powerless, and can be made more powerless by things like a past felony conviction or court-ordered child support and things like that.
Tell me how limiting their power and opportunity further helps them exactly? What were they doing before ride-sharing and other contract work? What jobs are suddenly available for them? Wouldn't creating new opportunities be better? Wouldn't creating a new classification be better? Wouldn't creating a general health and benefits pool for everyone be better?
Yes, better situations can/should exist, and yes, this legislation is terrible and helps nobody. The opposition is that a real solution was never sought after and instead we have unintended consequences, not that things were fine before.
the underlying assumption is that these companies _still_ would want people to do work (as that is how they make profit). So by forcing these companies to take workers on at a less advantageous terms, the workers gain more.
Of course, in reality, these legislations don't have the right effects, because companies' profit motive is stronger and more creative. After all, legislators' motives are to appear good to their electorate, not actually achieve results where as companies' motives _is_ to achieve results.
Whether or not it actually affects you as an individual is a different story.
There's no power differential, you can choose to live or die. See, easy.
Maybe instead of feeling proud that millions have lost opportunity, it would be better to create legislation that actually does improve their lives for once.
There are other easier ways to address that differential. Namely: unionization. In many European countries, there are no minimum wage laws. There is no government agency equivalent of OSHA. Instead, they have unions, where workers themselves band together and collectively bargain to ensure they're adequately compensated and given a safe working environment.
Instead, we in the United States, have chosen to make the government our union. Then we're shocked and surprised when it does a bad job, or when its blanket policies have disproportionate impact on certain industries.
US PTO: 0 days (!!), CA PTO: 16-30 days, EU PTO: Up to 36 days.
It was only 50 years ago that the Republicans were the party of labor unions [4]. How times changed.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
[2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=141001...
[3] https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/labor-force-part...
[4] https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/07/la...
Also, be very careful in comparing unions in Europe with the US, the systems are very different. Unions in Norway for example are not "per company", they are usually working across a whole industry or even across all industries for a particular education/work-role (like engineers). Employees chose freely whether to be member of a union, or which one to pick - and membership is independent of an employeer/contract.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Union_of_Public_Emplo...
The UAW theoretically got involved in the employment contract negotiations, but none of the RAs could get in touch with them despite paying union dues. There was a group trying to organize action to leave the UAW and form an independent union.
Large organizations tend towards incompetence and corruption over a prolonged period of time.
This is only true if the employer is a labor monopsony. Otherwise you can still refuse them and go work for another one, and they have to be the high bidder to receive your labor. You may have to work somewhere but you don't have to work there. Even the software engineer has to work somewhere.
And if the employer is a monopsony, fix that.
You say that as if they're mutually exclusive, but they really solve two separate problems.
If you have a monopsony on labor (note that this is not very common for unskilled labor; think company towns), it means that people are being compensated unfairly, in the same way that monopolies overcharge customers unfairly.
But even if you don't, there may be people whose fair market wage isn't enough to live on. Even if there are thousands of employers who need unskilled labor, it's still possible for the supply to outstrip the demand, which is the exact scenario that a UBI works well for -- the market wage may be $4/hour, but supplemented by a UBI it's enough to live on. Meanwhile in the same circumstances some other policies, like minimum wage, do the opposite -- when there is a glut of labor, price controls increase unemployment and make the problem worse, because then people don't get $4/hour plus a UBI, they get to collect unemployment until it runs out and then starve to death.
There are restrictions placed around how much you can charge in interest for taking a loan. Imagine if someone were to place a 1000% loan because they knew the people taking them were desperate enough for their next meal that they would take that that.
These laws exist for a reason. That they inconvenience you (or anyone else) is irrelevant.
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edit: well, not irrelevant... it's the entire point.
If we instead simply ban 1000% interest, it doesn't mean those people suddenly have better options than they did before... if means they are forced to pick an even WORSE option.
I can refuse because I know if I get fired over it, there's always UBI? And UBI will also abate my fear that I'll be blacklisted from getting another drywall job? Or even a painting job. Or really any labor job ever again.
That's the kind of UBI that would be abused in exactly the way its opponents predict.
But this specific issue is whether you can avoid micro management legalization by providing a social safety net. I don't dismiss the idea out of hand, but I do have some questions. It's the perfect topic to explore via a civilized debate.
Edit: added motive of exploration
I would also argue that our safety regulations should not be tied to whether a person is an employee or a contractor. Safety rules should be the same regardless.
I do think some regulation will still be needed, even if everyone had enough that they didn't have to work to survive. It is simply too easy for an employer to hide the danger from their employees; without regulations and inspections, it is likely that a lot of employees wouldn't even realize the danger until something bad happened.
Why would I pay an uneducated, inexperienced person to sweep floors $20 per hour? I’ll do it myself first. But at $8 am hour, the numbers make sense. So rather than one job at $8 per hour, now there is no job paying $20 per hour.
What’s better for the poor? $8 per hour at an entry level job, or $20 per hour for no job. And presumably when that $8 per hour worker gains experience and can provide more value, he either gets a raise or goes to another job that will pay what his skills are worth.
That's a mighty strong presumption to make. What skills exactly does one build up sweeping floors? And who is going to be incentivized to give out raises, when they could just hire a new person at the base wage?
Or maybe not depending on how much I cared about the company, but most likely I would.
So for these companies, it's required.
This has the effect of making people even more dependent on college, btw. And can effectively make certain types of career paths disappear entirely.
Thing of a greeter at Walmart. How easily can Walmart just do away with greeters?
1. There exist jobs that are not worth paying someone X/hour, but are worth it at some number less than X. For the purposes of this discussion, X is "a livable wage".
2. There exist people who work, but do not need to X to survive; retirees who just want to be out of the house, mentally handicapped individuals for whom being out doing work and meeting people is helpful, etc.
Those two points are facts.
Requiring that every job pay a livable wage means that the combination of the above two will no longer be available. Those jobs just will not exist if they need to pay that much. As a result, some subset of group 2 will no longer be able to work (this part is opinion, but seems a reasonable conclusion).
So, the tradeoff is being made to make live worse for some of those people in group 2... in order to make life better for people in a different group. That may or may not be a good tradeoffs. But just the fact that it exists as a tradeoff means that "no job may pay less than a living wage" is not a black and white topic; there's a grey area.
A private company shouldn’t be worried about providing a “livable wage”. A “livable wage” to my 18 year old son staying at home is not the same for a single mother of two doing the same job - that reality was part of the structure and purpose of the EITC. It’s just implanted badly.
I don’t need big government to make decisions for me.
Why? Do they not benefit from the same healthy society that's created from this?
And if we as a society decide that people should have health care, food to eat, and shelter, and that we should put the burden on private companies, we should do so in the form of corporate taxes.
These laws are not protecting anyone, they're preventing opportunities for them. A new classification between employee and contractor would've been a real solution. That would've been real progress to create benefits while maintaining flexibility. But that's not what happened.
Do you REALLY believe that laws that, say... limit how much interest you can charge on a loan CREATE vulnerability and marginalization?
Seriously?
What should be had is sufficient welfare programs and still let people work as they want (mostly).
Is this really what you want? To have your economy become less able to sustain social welfare, and to have the least moral companies become a greater and greater part of the economy? Because with the policies you are advocating that is what you are selecting for.
Exhibit A: Take most countries in south America, like Peru, Bolivia or Ecuador. They have labor laws that mandate workers should receive x (usually 3) months severance for every year worked.
As a result massive underemployment which means people are literally working the streets to make ends meet.
Minimum wage is the least of your worries when your wages will come from selling produce in the middle of the road.
You havent seen poverty until you see people living on top of garbage heaps picking up traah to survive.
Thats the kind of stuff you see in countries swimming in labor regulations.
If poor people are whom these meddlesome laws are supposed to protect, then draft the laws that way.
Someone who is not poor doesn't want to be screwed over by some protect-the-poor labor law.
E.g. it could be that a freelancer must be considered an employee if they are paid peanuts. If they are amply compensated, then not.
Various other kinds of labor laws could be sensitive to compensation. Nobody should be required to work without a break. But some consultant taking $200/hr from you should probably not be entitled to 8 hours pay for 7.5 hours work, with a paid 30 minute lunch period.
Work safety should be non-negotiable. Anyone working on your site should be safe, highly paid or not.
Then let's get rid of the exemptions, not the law.
Competitive companies will rarely make decisions that lower worker productivity. So the case of "freedom to be stupid" tends to lead to a race to the bottom on safety standards, as companies cut safety to increase productivity - and workers get dragged along for the ride.
I wonder how the perception of these laws would change under a more unionized workforce.
As an example, professional sports players unions are fairly powerful and the risk of injury is pretty high, much higher than I'd expect to be acceptable under OSHA, and people seem pretty comfortable with it as long as the players are informed of the risk (CTE disclaimer).
Look up the Underwriters Laboratory for a real life example of this happening without government, it’s successes are all around us.
For insurance carried by or provided the employer, any event that happens after employment ends is an externality and not covered. Extreme cases involving death will be underpriced as the employee won't have use for the money if they're dead.
In my own finances I carry a life insurance policy less than 1/10th of my nominal future earnings.
Consumer protection is similar. I don’t need the government to tell me that my Honda airbag may explode in my face, as an independent agent, I have the ability to go to arbitration with my concerns without some bureaucrats getting in the middle. If I choose, I can ignore the problem — that’s what freedom is all about!
What I can't figure out is how to allow non-vulnerable workers to waive those protections without affecting the vulnerable workers. The non-vulnerable workers come with a lot of cost advantages, which makes them more appealing than the vulnerable workers and creates pressure to make the non-vulnerable conditions the new "normal". Or worse yet, the jobs would only be available to people who already have primary employment (further reinforcing class discrepancies).
We should repeal every minimum wage law, yes. They were created a century ago with racist intentions, their effects are still racist and yet today they are defended as being "anti-racist." The actual minimum wage is and always has been $0, and more people get to (not) work for this wage in the minimum wage regime than would without it.
I have yet to see a reason why a body of torts and collective bargaining would not be completely effective at resolving the real issues that need solutions in labor law and workplace safety. (I'm not sure what you mean by "anti-compete" laws in a labor relations context.) The existing regime where administrative bureaucracies are essentially intermediaries with perverse incentives to reduce exchange between two otherwise consenting parties seems like the worst possible world.
To reframe your question, I think the solution is not "no laws," but laws that encourage more exchange but in a way that reduces power imbalances between consenting parties and give the parties a solid basis of legal (or equitable) recourse for undeniable wrongs that happen that were not anticipated by the contract.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
The point is that if no single person in a non-union company had any power then they wouldn't be paid anywhere near what they are in these companies.
That's multiple companies and already illegal.
> We should repeal every minimum wage law, yes. They were created a century ago with racist intentions, their effects are still racist and yet today they are defended as being "anti-racist."
That’s funny. I hope you aren’t one of the comedians impacted by this issue.
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w23532
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/107808741878766...
The second study is a survey of what employers say they were doing. It is not terribly surprising that they feel raising the minimum wage was bad.
I'm not saying raising the minimum wage was a slam dunk in Seattle or anything, but if we want to have an actual evidence-based discussion, let's not cherrypick papers. It's also worth noting that employers simply "taking their business elsewhere" is much easier if the minimum wage increase is highly local as it was in Seattle, which isn't the proposal most people are talking about.
And from that paper: "We attribute significant hourly wage increases and hours reductions to the policy." and "Approximately one-quarter of the earnings gains can be attributed to experienced workers making up for lost hours in Seattle with work outside the city limits."
Read the paper. It does not appear that the min wage of Seattle was a net positive for the workers or the city.
>The second study is a survey of what employers say they were doing. It is not terribly surprising that they feel raising the minimum wage was bad.
It's also not surprising that an increase in labor costs results in less labor being hired and an increase in prices.
Feel free to post papers that contradict the findings.
>let's not cherrypick papers
Agreed. Post papers if you think these were cherry picked and not representative of the outcome of Seattle min wage. You don't like the results I posted, which I think are representative (I've followed the academic lit on min wage for a long, long time), yet you don't post supporting evidence for your claims.
Simply type seattle minimum wage into Google scholar and look at the papers. I've found many with results similar to these, and none with the opposite claims.
For those following, the Seattle min wage seems consistent with what you'd expect from price floors: benefits for a smaller pool of workers at the cost of other workers priced out of work, increased prices, a decrease in labor hours, and some workers having to go outside the price floor (here, working outside Seattle) to make up the lost money.
> We should repeal every minimum wage law, yes. They were created a century ago with racist intentions, their effects are still racist and yet today they are defended as being "anti-racist."
Were the laws racist, or at least written by racists, possibly with racist intent? If so, I feel like the conversation might shift.
This is a bizarre way of looking at the world. The question is about the state of the world decades ago (were the laws written to further racist goals?). Yet you posit that the answer to this question might have some effect in the future. It's an excellent way to deflect from facing facts; suggesting that somehow we couldn't have known about what happened. We can, though. It's trivial to look up the history of minimum wage (without even checking Wikipedia, though, I'm sure it has a censored version of the history so you'll have to look elsewhere). Why do we get to deflect the consequences of the past to the future, to a "might", to a mere "shift"?
Minimum wage is and always has been a way to keep minorities from getting jobs by carefully drawing a line - and redrawing it, so the whole racist enterprise has surely been up and running this whole time - to be just above where it's worthwhile to hire people with poor job history (a proxy for minorities, just redlining with wages). As the economy improves of course this line has to be drawn higher and higher because it becomes more and more economically viable to make risky hires.
> e should repeal every minimum wage law, yes. They were created a century ago with racist intentions, their effects are still racist and yet today they are defended as being "anti-racist."
I would think someone should start with saying "those laws were not written by racists!" (and proving it) before they argue about the specific first/second order effects.
If there is any way these laws were written by racists with racist intent, I can't imagine a more important entry point to the conversation/discussion.
I’d love to see evidence of this. However, I agree the minimum wage laws should be reduced or changed in some circumstances. Previously in our history, you could apprentice and earn almost nothing while you learned a trade. To me, this is much better than paying a school to earn a trade and interning for free.
Also, in economies where there is no minimum wage, you usually see someone start somewhere on the cheap then “shop their skills around” and come back and say “I’m worth X so I’d like to make X or I’ll leave” and quickly they’re earning far more than minimum wage. When there’s a minimum wage, a business always knows they can find someone to fill it. There’s no value in keeping an employee and employees stop bartering for higher wages because they know how easily they can be replaced.
I wish I had a paper or something to link to, so all I have is my own anecdotal evidence seen in my life. Also, I did this as a 16 year old kid and within a year, was making $10 an hour at Wendy’s.
I think you should read up on guilds and how they operated. You would change your opinion very quickly.
The implication being that without such laws, enslavement of children, poisoning and maiming of workers, and other horrors would be totally legal in America?
Perhaps the real problem is the mess that occurs when governments recognize and try to control abstractions like corporations to protect people from liability.
Well, yes, without the laws that banned those things, they would be totally legal. That's what “law” means.
> Perhaps the real problem is the mess that occurs when governments recognize and try to control abstractions like corporations to protect people from liability.
Liability is as much a creation of government as corporations are.
100% incorrect
In fact corporations are a government created constructed with the expressed purpose of Limiting liability of the shareholders (owners) for what the corporation does in an effort to increase investment capital. People would be less likely to invest freely if they were personally liable.
Business Structures like corporations are like most other government regulations in that they LIMIT not create liability. From the EPA, to OHSA they all taken over the liability and they alone are the arbitrators of "acceptable" and individuals actual damages do not matter
Is it such a leap that liability is also a government created construct?
Your two statements are entirely independent.
All legal concepts are government created fictions. That includes everything from corporations to parking tickets. Why do you think corporations are government created concept but liability isnt?
Reductionism can be useful for argument but can also go too far and lose the point.
Wrongness (subjectively, at least; let's avoid the question of objective morality) exists independent of government, and independent of liability.
But liability is a creation of government through law, just as much as limitations on liability are. Which is why government has the power to limit liability; if liability was independent of government, government would also not be able to limit it.
Why would government create something then proceed to limit the very thing they created, that make no sense
It is limited liability because liability existed before the government, then the government came in to limit it
No,the premise is wrong. Government existed, and created liability, before government also created liability, so when government created limited liability, liability did exist to limit, even though that existence was not independent of government.
> It is limited liability because liability existed before the government
No, it 's called limited liability because liability existed before the limitation, not because liability existed before government.
Just like the FISA limits on government surveillance are called limits on government surveillance because government surveillance existed before FISA, but not because government surveillance existed before government.
Except, liability implements that innate sense of "wrongness" you and the other poster referred to, while limits on liability violate it. So in that sense one is justice (however flawed or approximate it may be in implementation) and one is injustice.
But my statement was even simpler than that. The limitation of that liability transfers it to an abstract construction (called a corporation) we just invented. Let's call it a "person" for dramatic effect(after all SCOTUS did). You can either hold a real physical person liable for an injustice they committed, or you can hold an imaginary person liable. There's a difference.
This is often the diverging point between a libertarian outlook on the world, and an authoritarian one.
To the Authoritarian all laws are just social constructs created by governments, thus it is all subjective and there is no objective truth or unethical laws
To libertarians like myself we believe in the Lockean concept of natural rights, where by laws and governments are erected by man to protect those natural rights and any government that goes beyond that goal is Authoritarian and unethical.
To summarize Frédéric Bastiat "The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties;"
Ethical Governments are formed to enforce this law, these natural rights, to provide a common defense force of a persons natural rights.
Ethical Governments are not formed to control and regulate all aspects of society at all levels and on all subjects
If you believe that there is some sort of natural rights that laws should reflect, than you believe that you can have good laws and bad laws. This implies laws are social constructs (that attempt to model some sort of semi-objective moral truth). If laws were not a social construct but objective rules, it would follow that there is no such thing as a bad law as they are the ground moral truth by basically fiat (which i would call the authortarian view)
I have no idea how you get from me expressing support for the basic idea of natural human rights to "there is no such thing as a bad law".
Of course there still could be bad law and object moral truth. Those laws would be immoral and we have all kinds of unethical and immoral laws today on the books. Many protests and riots have been done recently due to many of these immoral laws
I have no idea how you got from A to B in your comment
You claimed "To the Authoritarian all laws are just social constructs created by governments, thus it is all subjective" with the implication that libertarians (which you are arguing for) believe the opposite.
Thus you are claiming: "laws are not subjective"
By which i took to mean (this might have been a slight leap on my part now that i look at it again): laws are not simply someone's decree, and falliable like all human creations, but instead they have some deep truth or objective reality to them.
I concluded from this: laws cannot be bad, because that contradicts the idea that they have "truth" and are objective.
I don't believe you can judge something objective good or bad. Objective things just "are" they are neither good nor bad. Good and bad are the realm of the subjective.
Good, Ethical and Moral law is then derived from this objective principle
unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. The law has been used to destroy its own objective. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense. [2]
Then you are conflating labor laws with criminal law. Individuals are already prohibited from doing those things via criminal law. If one party is not paying the other, labor laws are irrelevant yet the behavior remains illegal.
Labor law and criminal law overlap; they aren't disjoint categories.
> Individuals are already prohibited from doing those things via criminal law. If
Yes, criminal labor laws adopted as part of broader regulation of labor practices.
> If one party is not paying the other, labor laws are irrelevant
Obviously untrue; labor laws are relevant whenever labor is being supplied, whether or not it is being paid. Indeed, the current requirement that labor being supplied be paid is part of labor law (and some aspects of it are fairly recent aspects of labor law), like the restriction on economically useful labor being provided via unpaid labor even when characterized as an internship.
Let me try putting it in a way that is (hopefully) freer from legal nitpicking: It's possible to create a system where consenting adults can engage in whatever consensual activities they wish, even when (gasp) money changes hands between them, and still not legalize objectively evil behavior like slavery, negligent homicide, etc. Further, I'd argue we don't even to make new laws to do it, though this part seems to be surprisingly controversial.
> Individuals are already prohibited from doing those things via criminal law. If
> Yes, criminal labor laws adopted as part of broader regulation of labor practices.
You're seriously saying that slavery, poisoning, and battery would be legal if not for labor laws?
Perhaps you don't recall the number of years in which slavery was legal in the US?
Or the years in which child labor was actually used?
Or the years in which a 40 hour work week wasn't normal?
The only way I'm able to understand how ANYONE can believe everything would be hunky dory without labor laws is if they haven't been educated in the history of this country (or any other country).
This is because you argue in bad faith. Apparently you already do understand the point I was making, namely that slavery is outlawed by the 13th amendment to the constitution, not the labor laws regulating consensual employee-employer decisions which the parent poster was talking about.
Huh? I don't get it - if i understand, you are suggesting that we should kill the concept of the corporation, while still making all law related to operating a business continue to apply to individuals, and somehow that will result in a utopia where nobody gets in the way of two parties consensually working with each other, but at the same time nobody will be abused/coerced? Do i have that right?
Specifically both my wife, a freelance writer, and my mother, a court reporter, have been negatively impacted by this law. I know more about the writer point of view and it is clear the legislators didn't both to understand the industry when placing the 35 article limit per client. My wife has multiple clients whom she writes a weekly blog post for. This is now illegal to do and my wife has lost clients over it. This area of the law is totally backwards the only time my wife has been exploited was as an employee. She went from making 40k as a full time employee to a range of 120k-150k as a freelancer. We are definitely planning on leaving the state over this and will be voting republican (except president) for the first time in our lives over this law.
The TLDR of this law is that arrogant legislators decided to write a bill about dozens of industries they didn't bother to learn anything about.
“The person is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as that involved in the work performed.”
If your public views conflict with your private practice, it invalidates your public views, not your private practice.
You cant be in favor of a law in a public forum and then repudiate it from a personal viewpoint