Hacker News Reader

Comment by bloppe | Hacker News Reader

If automation is the exploitation of workers by capitalists, then Luddism is the exploitation of consumers by workers. I don't want to be legally forced to pay double the price for clothing just because some well-connected weavers enacted regulation to ban more efficient competition.

View on HN

Because it's all about, and only about, you. Yes?

> Because it's all about, and only about, you. Yes?

Yes, it is about the collective "you," and always has been.

To suggest otherwise is preposterous.

Everyone is a consumer, it’s all of us.

It’s not just that you’re artificially keeping prices high, in a globalist world, someone else would do it and all the workers would lose their jobs.

Despite sounding like it's zero-sum, fighting for the consumer is actually the only way to lift everybody up. Fighting for workers specifically is playing favorites. Fighting for the ownership class is also playing favorites. Focusing on consumers makes everybody a winner over time.

Workers are consumers. A healthier working class and a more even distribution of wealth provides increased purchasing power. If all you can see is what you'd lose and not imagine what you'd gain, that's a fault of imagination, not the proposal.

I feel like you're arguing against me, but I could also take your comment verbatim and feel like it backs up my side. Favoring consumers means everybody gets their fair share.

"Fighting for workers" means "don't have child labour", and "don't have machines that regularly amputate people's limbs", and those types of things.

And "fighting for the consumer" is how we ended up with low-wage countries with little safety regulations making our stuff, and occasionally dying for it. This is also how we ended up with all sorts of other negative externalities ranging from worker exploitation to environmental impact.

You can't capture reality in simplistic one-liners.

Your circumstances may require changing to produce more compassionate circumstances for other human beings. For example, buying your twice as expensive clothing half as often. Apologies for the inconvenience.

If weavers are allowed to charge whatever they want for clothes, farmers must be allowed to charge whatever they want for food (no tractors allowed), etc. We would still have switch-board operators, and everything would be more expensive for everyone and half the people would be stuck doing busy work they don't actually need to do because their job could be automated.

It's not about convenience vs compassion. Luddism is not convenient nor compassionate for anybody

Reply on news.ycombinator.com