> It’s entitlement, very pure and simple.
There's no such thing as entitlement in a Capitalist market, it doesn't exist.
Value is what the market is willing to pay. If you can't hire people for minimum wage, and you can't get enough workers, then (in Capitalist terms) by definition you are undervaluing workers.
Of course standards rise over time; workers both have more expectations of what they'll be offered as the market becomes more efficient, and social structures outside of the market make it easier for them to be more demanding. But that's the same thing that's true of everything on the market, you can't claim that people are "entitled" because Open Source software makes it hard to charge $1000 for your web framework. If the government builds a free park, you can't claim that consumers are entitled because they stop paying you to go into your private park. Capitalism always exists inside the broader context of social/public resources, and in that context you adjust to the prices that the market demands or you go someplace else.
Part of the confusion here is that the word "value" means different things inside of a market than it does as a non-market, abstract term. It is valid to talk about the non-market, "objective" value that workers provide to a company, but once we start talking about prices inside the market, we have to keep in mind that the market definition of value is different. When we're specifically talking about Capitalism, value is what the market is willing to pay, and the market is not entitled just because it demands more than employers are currently willing (or even able) to offer.
It bothers me a lot when people apply one-directional morality to Capitalist systems. There's always this underlying idea that society needs to be grateful for businesses for giving us stuff, but that businesses don't own anyone anything. The reality is that after a free transaction, nobody should be feeling grateful to anyone. Workers do not owe anybody anything, it's up to businesses to build attractive enough jobs to get them to sign on, and workers do not owe businesses any gratitude or loyalty beyond what the contract states.
If that's disturbing to business owners, I don't know to say; that how Capitalism works, you form contracts. You bought into this system. And certainly, the idea that businesses are allowed to optimize purely for profitability and should be expected to be amoral machines, but that workers still have some moral obligation to know their place and be grateful for what they've been given -- that idea is antithetical to what Capitalism is.
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Secondly:
> But there’s no free lunch in society, and ultimately that’s the current disconnect.
Multiple people have different views of this, I'm not going to act like mine is universal. But I personally believe that an involuntary market can not truly be called a free market. Coercing someone into buying something doesn't result in a completely free, willing contract.
So when I look at the labor market and I see people complaining that workers have unemployment benefits, what I hear them saying is that they don't think a free market for jobs will actually work, and what I hear them saying that they think people have to be compelled into working under the threat of poverty and violence in order to keep the current system from collapsing.
And that's a view someone can have, that's fine; but then it's really hard to turn around and say that the market is necessarily compensating people fairly, because if the only reason someone is taking a contract is because they're scared of what will happen if they don't, then that contract is being made under duress.
My take on the current labor market is that if workers don't feel like they have the ability to quit jobs, and people are calling them entitled just for quitting abusive jobs, and if employers feel that slashing public safety nets is the only way that they'll get workers to take those jobs... I don't know, to me that doesn't sound much like a free market, it sounds like a coercive structure. And maybe it's OK to have a coercive structure, maybe that's just how the labor market has to work. But if that's the case we should at least acknowledge that it's coercive and treat it that way.
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> Prove me wrong with reasoned responses and discussion rather than downvotes.
The thing is, in a certain sense you're not wrong. Moving people's perception of what is "normal" will make them accept more abusive conditions without complaint, this is a commonly understood fact.
But it doesn't add a lot to the conversation, because it doesn't tell us whether it's reasonable to try and lower people's standards. It also feels vaguely anti-Capitalist in the sense that whole point of Capitalism is that over time people's standards should rise and that specialization should increase. Ideally, markets become more competitive over time, not less.
So you're right in the sense that, yeah, if we slashed minimum wage and social safety nets, people would have to take worse jobs with lower pay. If we brought back debtors prison and workhouses, that would probably lower their standards even more.
But if you're advocating that a free market can't exist unless people's baseline experience is so crappy that bad jobs seem good in comparison, then you shouldn't be surprised your view is unpopular.
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Also, generally I don't want to get into the "censorship" stuff, but since we're talking about free markets, downvotes on HN aren't censorship, they're the free market of commenters/readers in the comment section signaling they disagree with something or that they don't think it adds value to the conversation. The marketplace of ideas does not have an obligation to accommodate or prop up every idea. It's fine for the market to just say someone's wrong without providing additional context, in the same way that it's fine for someone to leave a one star review on a product without providing a justification why they did so.