Oh lord, being “forced” to provide work in order to receive the work of others
I think the US has serious progress to make on safety nets, but this type of statement doesn’t really help move the discussion forwards
I didn't write the comment you responded to, but I don't think its author was advocating for the mythical "free lunch." I read their comment as a statement decrying the seemingly artificial constraints built into modern (American, I presume) society that force workers to make an essentially binary choice between a stable, secure life and one of, potentially, poverty and marginalization.
To be more explicit - most people can't simply provide (even valuable, in-demand) work on their own terms, so they're forced (by various intentional and unintentional social/economic/legal/etc. barriers) to work according to terms that may not make sense to a rational third-party. This is (probably) why the commenter you responded to mentions the binary distinction between financial stability and physical insecurity - there's hardly any middle ground between the two categories when it comes to most fields of employment. Although "tech" is probably the most flexible industry in this regard, it's still difficult to find positions that allow part-time employment with health insurance benefits (even at lower-than-average pay rates), for example.
In most industries, the prospect of being able to work to provide only enough "value" to comfortably sustain oneself, as opposed to "being forced" to fully commit to the lifestyle (i.e. 40+ hours/week, car for commuting, lodging within commuting distance, childcare, general cost of paying for convenience in food/housework/etc. due to having less free time, etc.) is laughable. I believe this is what the commenter you reference was referring to - having the freedom to live cheaply without becoming financially insecure or socially marginalized, not some desire to have others pay for their lives.
Some folks fenced everything off, hunted the large animals to death, and re-educated the children.
There really isn't a choice, or at least if there is, I've seen what the US did to the folks choosing that choice, and it wasn't pretty.
If we're experiencing what it is to have an employer have 8:2 relative power to an employee, that doesn't mean that a ratio of 6:4, while still favoring the employer, is no different.
> I think the US has serious progress to make on safety nets, but this type of statement doesn’t really help move the discussion forwards
This type of statement is nothing new. The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass had this to say on the subject[1]:
> [E]xperience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other
According to Wikipedia[1]:
> Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market: "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper"