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Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

> It depends on the relationship

No, it depends on leverage. If you've got the most leverage, the relationship will be pleasant. If you don't, the relationship will be abusive. Just like everything else in capitalism. Supply/demand balance and friction matter far more than how "nice" your customer/employer is.

The distinction is crucially important: if relationship quality were an independent variable, everyone would be able to find decent relationships by hopping between jobs every now and again. Unfortunately, that's not how it works. The market determines what employers can and can't get away with, so someone stuck in a crummy relationship is likely to find a bunch of equally crummy relationships when they go job shopping.

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> No, it depends on leverage. If you've got the most leverage, the relationship will be pleasant. If you don't, the relationship will be abusive. Just like everything else in capitalism.

Exactly. And it's not for nothing that "Workers of the world, unite!" is included in the Communist Manifesto, as uniting themselves against their employers was one of the few methods of gaining leverage for 19th-century workers.

If it counts I'm more of a Libertarian kind of guy, but even so I'm wondering for how long these growing power-unbalances will be ignored by both those "in power" (corporate employers, politicians, finance people) who just seem to crave for more and more, and also by us, the "normal people", who just carry on with our lives like things have never been better.

Because at the end of it all private property is merely a social construct, and once 100, 1000, 10000 people will find it strange that their combined earnings amount to what a "capitalist" or financier earns, then, just maybe, those people will decide to put that rich guy/girl in front of a wall and shoot him/her down. It happened before (see the Bolsheviks, for example), not sure why it couldn't happen again.

>not sure why it couldn't happen again.

Drones. And you better believe the powers that be will criminalize any movement that might level the playing field. The window of opportunity for change is closing.

There's a significant difference between the middle east and the USA in the number of disenfranchised chemists/EEs/mechEs/biologists/programmers per capita. The continued efficacy of technology developed "over there" is far from guaranteed if it is applied "over here."

I really, really hope it doesn't come to that. Horrible and messy would be the understatement of the century. Everybody loses, just some more than others. But my imagination has been drawn to this scenario more than once and I don't think the fight would be universally one-sided.

My hope is that we'll see some kind of market inversion when rent-seeking grows to a large enough part of the economy that the ever-falling inefficiency of distributed production becomes reasonable in comparison. Like communes, but without an anti-tech focus (progress in distributed production technology is what will turn them from bad ideas into good ideas, after all).

I just hope it happens before the violence starts in earnest.

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