[flagged]
Re "HN appears to lean pretty heavily":
HN users have a variety of ideological points of view, just like any large-enough, distributed-enough population sample does. Most perceptions about this are in the eye of the beholder, i.e. strongly affected by cognitive bias - lots of past explanation at these links if anyone cares:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32069498.
> The real reason that the minimum wage is wrong is because the government should possess no authority to interfere with the employer/employee wage agreement or contract.
As for child sex workers, there are 2 simple questions to ask a libertarian that will reveal where they stand there.
1. Do you think prostitution should be legal?
2. Do you think a 17 year old should be able to prostitute themselves? How about 16? How about 15? How about... You'll pretty quickly find a line that isn't a clear 18 or 21.
It's seems like a strawman, but it isn't. You don't get to advocate for deregulation and allowing for anyone to contract for anything (a core tenant of libritarianism) without running into these issues.
[1] https://www.libertariancountry.com/blogs/news/there-should-b...
No it isn't, plenty of countries with much better worker conditions than USA doesn't have a minimum wage.
A libertarian does not support a nation with strong regulations protecting unions. They wouldn't stop a union, but they'd also be in favor of allowing a business to fire employees everytime they unionize.
The better worker conditions are coming from strong unions, not lack of minimum wage. Unions are so weak in the US that killing the minimum wage would turn us into a sweatshop nation.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080515/5-dev...
Right, and they would also be in favor of unions killing a business via strikes if the union doesn't like what the business is doing. I live in Sweden, there is nothing legally that prevents a company from setting whatever wages they want, the only thing that is stopping them is that unions would make it really hard for them to find and hire people. The laws you have in USA are mostly to protect companies from unions, that is why your unions are weak.
The way it works: Lets say that a company is paying too little in a city according to the union. Then the union will pay those workers to strike, so they still get their money, until the company raises the wages. This makes workers much more powerful than companies in these scenarios, and is why worker rights are better in Sweden than USA.
Perhaps I'd be more in favor of doing away with the minimum wage if the US wasn't so anti union. However, it is and thus doing away with the minimum wage is a bad idea. It's one of the few labor protections we have.
Wikipedia makes this sound like an extreme niche theoretical position within Libertarianism, and you're claiming it as a mainstream position:
> Libertarians generally believe that voluntary slavery is a contradiction in terms.[60] However, certain right-libertarians dispute the Lockean claim that some rights are inalienable and maintain that even permanent voluntary slavery is possible and contractually binding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debates_within_libertarianism#...
> That's what "abolishing the minimum wage" IS. It's about allowing slavery (https://www.libertariancountry.com/blogs/news/there-should-b...).
Of course, libertarians believe no such thing and indeed your own link refutes your claim.
> As for child sex workers, there are 2 simple questions to ask a libertarian that will reveal where they stand there.
This isn't even anecdotal evidence.
> It's seems like a strawman, but it isn't. You don't get to advocate for deregulation and allowing for anyone to contract for anything (a core tenant of libritarianism) without running into these issues.
You seem to be conflating "advocating against certain regulation (even most regulation)" with "advocating against all regulation (effectively anarchy)". At a minimum, virtually all libertarians believe in regulation against (involuntary) slavery, theft, assault, etc, so clearly they favor certain kinds of regulation which support liberty, and thus they can also take the view that "voluntary slavery" is illiberal and thus subject to regulation (and from the tone of that Wikipedia quote, it sounds like many "except certain right-libertarians" do hold this view).
> Libertarians generally believe that voluntary slavery is a contradiction in terms.
In otherwords, they don't believe there is such a thing as "voluntary slavery". That is, if you volunteer for it, it's not slavery. That's a cute word game they are playing just so they don't have to accept the fact that they condone slavery.
A Libertarian supports the idea a person could sign a contract where they get no pay AND they have to follow all the rules of their employer. IE, Indentured Servitude [1]
That's the more direct form of slavery. There is also indirect forms of slavery such as the Company town. [2] Again, if you are following the core libertarian notion that the only thing that government should enforce is contracts between people, then there's nothing wrong with a company buying a city and forcing the inhabitants to use their currency and pay them rent.
> Of course, libertarians believe no such thing and indeed your own link refutes your claim.
No, it doesn't. It tries to hand wave why a minimum wage is actually bad and someone not being paid could be good. A core of the article is this
> The real reason that the minimum wage is wrong is because the government should possess no authority to interfere with the employer/employee wage agreement or contract.
That's a fairly uncontroversial statement for libertarians and one that leads DIRECTLY to serfdom and slavery. But they don't want to take it to it's logical (and historical) conclusion so instead they say "Oh, well, slavery only means forced slavery and NOTHING ELSE".
> At a minimum, virtually all libertarians believe in regulation against (involuntary) slavery
And isn't that a problem? The fact that a political ideology could support voluntary slavery doesn't make it a good one. The fact that the ideology MUST play word games to feel better about itself is also not a good one.
> theft, assault, etc,
I never said libertarians were against personal injury. Though, they'd take it not in the form of regulations but rather a strict injury notion. IE, you don't need a law to say "thou shalt not steal" instead, a libritarian would have a judge say "Without a contract, you took x from someone, therefore you need to compensate them x". These are not regulations. Regulations are things like "buildings may not be more than x height in this area" or "Employers must pay a minimum wage".
> "voluntary slavery" is illiberal and thus subject to regulation (and from the tone of that Wikipedia quote, it sounds like many "except certain right-libertarians" do hold this view).
I honestly think you misread that wiki qoute. It is not saying that voluntary slavery is illiberal, but rather just not a thing. The words contradict and thus make not sense. The further right libertarians are arguing for involuntary slavery. Generally of the form of "I and my family will work for you for 5 generations if you give us Y". The 3rd generation did not volunteer for that. That is what libertarians debate on whether or not it is slavery (with most being against it for obvious reasons).
In otherwords, libertarians argue that slavery isn't slavery when the person signs a contracts willingly. In that case it's just signing a contract. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/34vqo6/change_...
No, I really don't. I was looking at the quote in its totality, not carving out little bits that purport to support my claims.
> In otherwords, they don't believe there is such a thing as "voluntary slavery". That is, if you volunteer for it, it's not slavery. That's a cute word game they are playing just so they don't have to accept the fact that they condone slavery.
No, progressives were the ones who extended slavery to refer to people who needed to take low paying jobs to subsist (which was the default state for most people for all of human history). Outside of progressive contexts, slavery has never meant anything other than forced servitude. These libertarians are using "slavery" correctly (that doesn't imply that indentured servitude is a desirable state of affairs).
> A Libertarian supports the idea a person could sign a contract where they get no pay AND they have to follow all the rules of their employer. IE, Indentured Servitude [1]
They believe that minimum wages lead to more people losing their income altogether and thus starving to death, and that this is a worse state of affairs than taking a low paying job.
> that's the more direct form of slavery.
Indentured servitude isn't slavery, per your own link. You are now the one playing word games. Anyway, it looks like you're going to manipulate semantics, which is the dullest way to debate, so I'm ducking out.
Isn't a straw man argument like
1 -"We should ban porno in libraries"
2- "What if they ban history books next"
What you are talking about is a slippery slope argument.