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Comment by wiredearp | Hacker News Reader

If the combined cost of housing, education, retirement, childcare and healthcare amounts to more than any average person can earn during a lifetime, these advantages are in other words never comparative to your investment of time and labor, you could argue that the free market has instituted a form of slavery even if we call it reality. You are after all working under the threat of physical harm if your healthcare depends on employment and we call that violence. Except of course in America where we call it freedom.

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None of those expenses are fixed. When people earn more money they spend it on more expensive houses, better education, high quality childcare (read education), and better healthcare. The amount of money you make at minimum wage would fund a nice lifestyle in 1700 - inflation adjusted. The "bathroom" would be an outhouse and a bucked of water you heat on a fire. You wouldn't have even a beat up old car to drive.

There is no visible end in sight to this trend.

Law of Rent and Iron Law of Wages say otherwise.

Read Smith.

Book I, Chapter 8, beginning "There are certain circumstances, however, which sometimes give the labourers an advantage" and through to "The scanty maintenance of the labouring poor, on the other hand, is the natural symptom that things are at a stand, and their starving condition that they are going fast backwards."

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...

The subject does have a lot of complexity that doesn't fit in a comment box. My point stands in general, but it gets complex.

Among the reasons I threw the book at you.

I know, I've read the book, my comment is right out of it.

Housing, food, water, healthcare and so on are scarce because of nature.

If you want to argue that the laws of physics, human physiology and metabolism have conspired to make us all slaves, fine. But you're pushing the word "slave" into territory where it makes no sense.

I thought the whole point of capitalism was to make things cheaper.

I'm not sure if capitalism has a "point" but it almost incontestably has "made things cheaper".

It hasn't altered the fabric of reality to abrograte the laws of physics or human physiology.

They are scarce, and capitalism makes them more abundant at the cost of subjugation. Humans work endlessly to have access to things that, while scarce, were available in nature for free, often in superior forms. The world no longer supports the lifestyle of our ancestors, so there really is no choice but grind for currency in order to survive. There is evidence that nomadic hunter-gatherers had better nutrition, less disease, less violence, fewer children and "worked" far fewer hours per year than those in the agricultural and industrial eras. By comparison, it's not hard to think of those more modern lifestyles as a form of wage slavery. Work will set you free and all that.

First, comparing capitalism to Auschwitz is obscene. Second, nothing in nature is free. It isn't free for animals today: all of their energy is expended just staying alive. The Rousseauian view of hunter-gathers as living in Eden is nonsense. The death rate for children and mothers was horrifically high until fairly recently. Entire diseases, once deadly or debilitating, have been cured.

If you want to go work on a farm, you can (and I know people who do). You can join some collective living arrangement, you can become Amish, you can live on a kibbutz. You can travel around the country picking up odd jobs and surviving perfectly well because food is so cheap. You're free to do what you like but what you choose to do is whine on the internet because you dislike freedom.

There's plenty of room for improvement in the world. It's sad that people instead babble about "slavery" and "sugjugation," things they know nothing about.

> First, comparing capitalism to Auschwitz is obscene.

That phrase has been used before and after the holocaust to justify cruelty, but fair enough, it was in bad taste. Any thoughts on the obscenity of sending grandma to work the fields so she can afford her oatmeal?

> Second, nothing in nature is free. It isn't free for animals today: all of their energy is expended just staying alive.

Humans today work harder for their resources than hunter-gatherers did. Something is wrong with that.

> The death rate for children and mothers was horrifically high until fairly recently.

Again, it wasn't as high if you look further back.

> Entire diseases, once deadly or debilitating, have been cured.

One of society's great success, although again, these diseases only really started to spread once we decided to clump together year-round and slave away in the fields.

> It's sad that people instead babble about "slavery" and "sugjugation," things they know nothing about.

Good thing you're here to inform us all about how the people in the article, and forced labor around the world really need to shift their perspective and understand how good they've got it.

Calling what the modern day American poor have as 'a form of slavery' is disingenuous. Not being able to afford all of those things is a result of being poor, not of them being subject to 'a form of slavery'.

Well I wasn't referring to the poor specifically. [We can't afford to live anymore](https://aninjusticemag.com/we-cant-afford-to-live-anymore-an...) and there are [good reasons](https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...) for that. If you have zero savings by working three honest jobs and is otherwise left to die, you are if not a slave then at least a serf.

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