Comment by gremlinsinc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gremlinsinc | Hacker News Reader

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I think freedom as in free to run any business without regulations, bribe politicians, and starve if you lack the wherewithal to "pull yourself up by the bootstraps".

-- tongue-in-cheek --

In all seriousness though, honestly the entire world is ran by oligarchs like Papa John Schnatter who took 20 months to purge the "N" word from his vocabulary...what exactly "counts" as a free country?

My "view" of a free country must include the following: A country with guaranteed healthcare, education (k-college), safety nets, and a decent plan for global warming induced famines and water shortages, parental leave, and maybe a UBI if we continue hemorrhaging jobs due to globalization, climate change, machines replacing workers,and of course a country that has fought (and won) against systemic racism (esp. in policing and workforce-equality).

By my count there's ...0 countries that fit my criteria for a "free" country. I mean maybe Finland comes close, not sure on the racism. I'm white so, I don't always "notice" myself, I'm only more aware because of the past year all the atrocities that occured by white supremacists in blue uniforms.

Don’t you use “free” as a way to say “something that matches your politics and wishes for the world”? The “free world” is generally about individual freedoms, and democratic systems vs authoritarian regimes. It’s not something that englobes every political topics. Of course a “free” world is more an ideal than an actual reality and isn’t binary, but that gives some direction.

In your free country, am I free to not pay for all your good ideas? What happens to me if I refuse to contribute to your ideas?

>am I free to not pay for all your good ideas

Depends where you live. In most European countries, as long as you are a resident with a legal address, past a certain amount of time lived here, you're expected to contribute a certain proportion of your earnings as taxes to fund all public and social services.

You can try to push your own idea through a political party, or create a new one. Or you protest in the street to express your position and try to attract others. By definition a democratic system isn’t stable, rules you don’t like can be changed and can evolve, but given the number of “stakeholders” (citizens) that takes a while to reach decisions.

If you want to maximize autonomy in the sense you're hinting at, I suggest looking into Liberland, a currently undeveloped piece of swampland that will no doubt be a prospering night-watchman city-state one day. It's a project that's already completely unencumbered by good ideas.

It could perhaps be offered as an emigration option to people who are opposed to paying into a system that everyone will benefit from.

That's just an affluent and advanced economy. None of what you says classifies as free. GNU even says it's stuff is "free as in freedom, not free as in beer." All of what you said is free as in beer.

Free education and healthcare isn't "free as in beer" in that you could have a "tax" on education when/if the education pays dividends (i.e. the person becomes a doctor) then they can pay it off, if their income never exceeds say 100k then they never have to pay it off.

If we can value one career over another then surely we can pay for those who choose to go into less pay-worthy but still necessary jobs like teachers.

As for healthcare single-payer would save lives and money and cut costs across the board, pretty sure that's a win-win for everybody without anything being "free" because you know we all pay for it out of taxes.

Free as in Beer would be my tax money going to pay for fancy toys for military and police that I'll never use, or the money that politicians get for siding against the people and for big business.

Real freedom would be freedom from the institution of wage labor

You can start a business in order to escape wage labor, with you being the boss.

Or did you mean escape from labor?

No that would count. But the way we arrange things makes it impossible for everyone to escape wage labor. The way to do that would be to eliminate the legal framework for corporations and replace it with a framework for worker cooperatives which are run democratically by workers. The theory is if workers collectively employ themselves they're not being employed by someone else. Similar to how in political democracy, if citizens collectively govern themselves then they aren't being governed by someone else.

But cooperatives are a thing. They exist and they actually do work. And you can start one whenever you want with whoever you want.

Do you just want to force every company to be a cooperative? If so, have you thought about why business owners tend to opt to own what they worked on?

I don't think it's appropriate for the state to enforce contracts of wage labor, for similar reasons that they shouldn't enforce contracts of child labor or indentured servitude. No one would be forced to do anything, they can hire or do wage labor if they want, but the state wouldn't participate.

No, it wouldn't be, because without wage labor there would be no food, shelter and technological progress. Even in a post scarcity world we would still need people who at least develop new product ideas.

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