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Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

And that, right there, is the argument of the standard sociopathic capitalist.

Just because there is a benefit, does not mean that there is not also a greater harm that more than offsets the benefit on a societal scale.

Privatizing the profits from the benefits while socializing the harms, and justifying any harm based on a profitable benefit, is far too often the business model - take the money while poisoning the well.

This is neither sustainable, nor a good argument for something to exist.

EDIT: insert missing "not also"

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It's no different than having less expensive foreign labor do the work and then importing the goods. The only thing the minimum wage does here is ensure that nobody is allowed to perform the task at that rate.

Toss out the minimum wage and institute a survival level "basic income" instead. If it is truly the desire of a society to set a minimum acceptable amount of money that a person deserves, let the cost be paid by society itself. Then people can have an open, unquestioned choice about what rate they are willing to accept to perform a job to supplement their income: be it unpaid internships or working at a fruit stand.

If license plates were harvested for free, there would be fewer jobs making license plates. Ceteris paribus, the reasoning that we shouldn't use the free license plates because they're reducing the number of jobs making them doesn't make sense.

This is independent of your separate objections that prisoners should not be taken advantage of.

>> the reasoning that we shouldn't use the free license plates because they're reducing the number of jobs making them doesn't make sense.

Yes, once the things are made, simply wasting the things on principle is, well, simply wasteful.

That said, if that step of wasting them is required in order to stop the practice of (near-)slavery, then the waste could be worthwhile.

Either way, slavery is bad both in it's own right and to the extent that it harms wider society by degrading the value of others' labor.

This could also be solved by requiring all jobs to pay a bona-fide living wage, as in, you cannot hire anyone unless you are paying them for 40 hours of work an amount that is sufficient to support them and dependents for all basic needs, i.e., food, housing, health, transport, etc. Perhaps an exception for dependents who are entering the workforce, who could be paid lower rates for a certain time. With this, then slavery wouldn't have so much outside harm in addition to its intrinsic harm.

I think I wasn't clear. It seems like there are two things that you are suggesting are bad:

1. Slaves

2. People losing jobs because goods can be produced more cheaply than they should be paid for producing them.

I'm saying that #2 isn't bad on its own. Air is free. It is available for less than it would cost people to produce it. That's not a problem.

The cost of what you're proposing is that some jobs won't be done at all. Maybe that is acceptable to you.

>>The cost of what you're proposing is that some jobs won't be done at all. Maybe that is acceptable to you.

Interesting.

I think that it is acceptable, and actually inevitable - only the threshold of [won't get done] changes.

At some point, if a thing has so little value that people won't pay enough for it to be done, whether the threshold is living wages or prison wages, why should it be created?

We already have far too much junk in the world.

If the thing is sufficiently valuable, then its cost can increase to a sustainable level. E.g., water used to be free also, and paying for bottled water when tap or stream water was right at hand was mocked. But now, people are happy to pay often stupid-money for bottles of water.

I don't know... the capitalist model works well to a certain extent. I would agree with the grand parent idea if (and only if) it included extremely heavy taxation law. It's OK for corporations to compete on extracting the most efficient labor, but only if we can "socialize" the gains through taxation.

The problem in the current capitalist system is that private companies have managed to corrupt that other size of the system (taxation) through bribes to the government.

Sociopathy isn't a recognized diagnosis among psychiatrists. It's narcissism these days.

Ok, "standard dark-triad-personality-trait capitalist"

... or is it "quad" these days? ;-)

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