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Comment by paulhauggis | Hacker News Reader

"no" has been replaced by laws and regulations. Nice.

There's a difference between "no" and a "no + no economic coercion".

Earning money usually means doing lots of hard and unpleasant things. Giving your facebook login information is hardly the worst thing employer can ask you to do. Why is it so special? How do you determine what should and what shouldn't be allowed?

What if your employer wants you to steal from your family? What if your employer wants to have sex with you? You either believe labor laws should exist or you don't. If you do, I don't think the answer need to be anything more than "common sense".

> What if your employer wants you to steal from your family?

Stealing should be illegal in any case. It has nothing to do with labor laws.

> What if your employer wants to have sex with you?

Again. If you don't like prostitution, ban prostitution. It has nothing to do with labor laws.

> You either believe labor laws should exist or you don't.

> If you do, I don't think the answer need to be anything more than "common sense".

Those two sentences are classic logical fallacies. I can support just some labor laws and "common sense" is not an answer to anything.

It's true. People can't be adults and say "No", so they have to have laws passed to do it for them.

It's a strange world we live in...

In theory I agree, but for people who are in a situation where jobs are not plentiful, saying "no" is not a realistic option. Unless, of course, one is willing to back-up that "no" with arbitrarily expensive legal wrangling (which also happens to blacklist the individual with other employers).

If you say "yes," it means you preferred the job to the alternative (unemployment). Like every other decision in your life, you either prefer one option or the other. I dislike the weaseling rhetoric of "I didn't really want to give up my passwords, but I had to find a job." That just means that finding a job is more important to you than keeping your passwords secret.

I can think of a few things that count as weaseling rhetoric, but I am not sure I'd count your example as a particularly good one.

The post taken as a whole, on the other hand, and I think you may be onto something.

Your comment appears to be saying that it's morally reasonable to coerce the desperate. Allow me to explain my train of thought:

Let's say that every business adopted this "your passwords or your job" policy. There will be a set of employees/applicants with enough leverage in the job market that they can say "no", and move on with life.

There will also be a (much larger) set of employees and applicants that do not have that kind of leverage in the job market, and have to make a choice between their facebook password, and the freedom to starve. The former can rationally say "no". The latter rationally can't.

Limiting morality to those who can afford it doesn't sit well with me. I'm completely fine with the government stepping in to mitigate the effects of undue coercion in society.

Those who think that coercion only exists at the barrel of a gun, lack a certain amount of imagination.

If seeing an applicant's Facebook profile is important to employers, then the market wage for an applicant who says "yes" is higher than that of an applicant who says "no". Based on that, allowing people to say "yes", even when they're doing so for lack of another good option, lets them make more money than they would otherwise make. Banning them from saying "yes" prevents them from capturing that higher wage.

A law that "protects" applicants from having the option to say "yes" lowers their income. Giving them the freedom to answer the question either way leaves them the choice between a higher income and the privacy of their Facebook account. It's not a happy choice, but if I valued the first more highly, I wouldn't like the government to force the second on me.

How the heck does it follow that the market wage is higher for those who say yes? What sort of mental gymnastics even get you to that point? You are making a big assertion with absolutely no evidence here, back up your statement with even a tiny fraction of a fact please.

It seems infinitely more likely that employers would blanket policy everyone to give up their passwords, and every other bit of personal info period, or they wouldn't get a job.

Whether or not employers are inherently coercive depends on your political/philosophical views behind wage labor. It's a big topic, and not one we're going to reach a consensus on in a Hacker News comment thread. Socialists tend to view wage labor as inherently coercive (using the pejorative term "wage slavery"), while capitalists generally view employment as a valid contractual relationship.

I tend to fall more on the capitalist side of things. I wouldn't consider employment coercive, unless the bad alternative (e.g. starving) was actively being caused by the potential employers (something like "work for us for $1 an hour or else we will kick you off your land).

No, it means that we've gotten ourselves into a situation where employers can force candidates into having to choose between being free or giving up their privacy so some asshole in HR can judge whether they are "worthy" of a job based on some ridiculous criteria that is nobody's business.

So long as there is no reasonable welfare system in place, coercion is entirely possible at the bottom end of society.

And this, kids, is the bridge that takes libertarianism from "force and fraud are wrong" to "but luckily there's no such thing as force or fraud when I do it".

It isn't force. Employees aren't slaves. They can start a business or move onto a company that doesn't ask for any of this info.

This is why the majority of people starting a business, fail. Looking at the comments here, people just give up at the first sign of trouble (or need mommy and daddy government to step in and make decisions on their behalf).

I downvoted you for blatant use of a straw man and an ad hominem attack of pretty much everyone who's disagreed with you by categorically stating that they're all looking for "mommy and daddy".

> "They can start a business or move onto a company that doesn't ask for any of this info."

Riiiiiiight. Because the blacks totally had that choice. And the women! And the Irish! And the Jews! It's kind of weird to me how libertarians model the world so simply - where culture doesn't exist, humans are perfectly rational actors, and all systems are 100% efficient. Real life isn't game theory.

Libertarianism only seems likely to work in two cases:

1. Small societies where everyone has skills or resources that are essential to the others, or

2. Societies where everyone has resources to be self-sufficient.

There may also be a requirement that the society not be in competition with outside, non-libertarian societies for necessary resources, because libertarianism is poor at handling negative externalities. A non-libertarian society has the option of careful government regulation which allows better utilization of important natural resources.

You need to define your terms, namely "libertarianism" and "work." I assume you mean right-libertarianism, something like anarcho-capitalism or perhaps minarchism. By a society "working," you could mean scores of things, from maximizing personal happiness, to raising the minimum personal happiness, to maximizing average income, to maximizing socioeconomic equality, etc. Do you consider any modern or past society as "working?"

I suspect you don't know much about "libertarianism," or else you just use the term to refer to more moderate positions, like the American Libertarian party. There are libertarians (like Noam Chomsky) who view wage labor as inherently coercive and immoral.

Do you seriously think that a Facebook account is more important than feeding your family?

You may be well off to afford not to work, there are lots of people for which that is the stark choice.

Do you seriously think there is only one employer? There are plenty of employers that don't ask for your Facebook account info.

If enough people are angry about it, the employer will be forced to stop because they won't get enough candidates.

Not at the bottom end of employment ladder. For low-skill jobs there are often more candidates than open positions, so almost everyone is expendable. For example, a food store on the corner of my street can, and has many times fired a clerk only to find a replacement within a day or two. At the low end of the job market there is always someone who is younger, has less integrity and/or is willing to put up with more crap than you - so you're completely expendable.

no. just, no. but go read this, you may find it strangely soothing.

http://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com/

You can still say "NO," but when rent is due and you're down to the last pack of diapers, you cannot afford to be that brave. Real life and all

You can also anticipate this with a fake account just for that purpose. Sure you can have my login, I joined a while ago but I am not very active on there.

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