wfo

Well yes, a union is organized democratically so you can vote on what you support if you're part of one. The problems you identify are central to all of democracy: what if you lose the vote? Then positions you don't support will be supported! Decisions made by the majority don't obey the will of the minority! So your solution is to eliminate the vote altogether and give away any voice you have, since you might not get everything you want -- not have unions at all; to reject any democracy altogether, and instead let a tiny few wealthy oligarchs make all the decisions. The alternative is your work goes to support whatever the executives of the company want, which is usually explicitly the opposite of what is good for you since your salary and everything that is good for you costs the company money. The profits from your labor will go to efforts to automate your job out of existence, they will go to efforts to lobby to take away all of your rights and protections, benefits and bonuses. This is currently exactly what happens in every non-unionized workplace.

Actually small businesses (while they vary widely and many of them can be good) can be home to the worst kind of abuse. Small business owners can be absolutely monstrous tyrants to their employees. Have you ever met a waitress at a restaurant who hasn't been sexually harassed by her boss? I've met.. one? and I've met quite a few waitresses. She can't complain to HR, there is no HR, there are no policies, there is just the boss who will fire her (and maybe "forget" to send her her last paycheck, oops). Wage theft is rampant in small businesses that can go underwater and don't have a payroll department. Workers absolutely need help at small business, probably more help even than at large corporations.

If they are smart, they should: right now they have a lot of power in the workplace because there is demand for them. This is a problem tech business owners have identified: programmers have too much power on the job relative to their bosses. They require good wages, they require too many benefits, they complain and sue when they are sexually harassed, they demand equity and to be treated well and refuse to accept the company asserting total ownership of their person in their contract, like non competes, binding arbitration, corporate ownership of every thought they have on the job or off. Could you imagine a company tracking every movement of every programmer at all times and automatically firing those who fail to "perform" according to certain metric? Does your eye linger too long on a comment relative to your peers? Fired. Did it take you too long to write this method this one time? Fired. This is the reality for Amazon warehouse workers and it could be for you, easily.

But there is a solution (from the prospective of employers) for this "problem": every time you hear someone talk about "teaching everyone to code" or "the STEM shortage" (which absolutely does not exist -- there is a shortage of qualified programmers willing to work for $12/hr, a shortage of hard science PhDs willing to do menial lab work for 10$/hr) this is coded language for "let's make millions more programmers so that they become so commonplace they become a commodity and may be treated as such". As it turns out, programming is not that hard, anyone could do it if they learned. And they are learning.

Programmers would be smart to unionize before this strategy succeeds, not after, it will be much easier while they still have power. But this requires social and political intelligence, and for programmers (who lean Libertarian up until the moment they get laid off or abused by their boss) to put their egos aside and disabuse themselves of the notion that they succeeded only because they are so much more brilliant than everyone else.

The Jungle is a piece of historical fiction that was accurate while remaining fictional, was of course designed to make a point (as all meaningful writing is) and captures an era and expresses in a clear way the inevitable plight of non-wealthy people subjected to capitalism. To dismiss it in this way is to dismiss all of history itself, which is simply accurate stories about people's lives. To not read it is to plug your ears and shout "I can't hear you" about what it's like to be poor or working class under the brutal regime of unfettered free markets and the problems and horrible abuse these people face. But hey, I wouldn't want to complicate my clean and pure political ideology which is completely coincidentally directly in service of my own personal pocketbook and power with a modicum of understanding about the lives of others less fortunate, would I?

Your examples sure are clean. But the real world is dirty. What exactly is "juice?" Are you, a Libertarian, proposing that the government spend years and millions of dollars creating a U.S. official definition of "juice" for labeling purposes? What happens when inevitably companies skirt the line?

And sure if I sell you poison on purpose knowing it's poison wanting to kill you that's murder. What if I'm a company that produces milk but I cut corners and possibly some number of milk products happen to be poisonous, though I never try to poison anything? What if I build cars and realize they will explode and kill people but figure I'll make more money selling them and dealing with the deaths than a recall? What if I use my vast power and wealth to systematically suppress all knowledge about how dangerous my products are and market them as safe and "doctor-approved", watching my smoking customers die thousand after thousand? What if I sell investments I know are bad, but I lie and fake ratings for them and sell them as high-quality, defrauding people by the millions? What if I extort an entire state by manipulating its energy supply? What if I poison rivers, drinking water, give communities cancer, lie about emission test results and poison the air, create children's toys with lead all because it's more efficient? All of these examples I cited have happened, recently, in our currently non-Libertarian society, and are nearly identical to your example and nobody was charged with murder. Libertarians support fewer regulations, less oversight, more market freedom -- the freedom to do all of the above with even more impunity than they do now.

Libertarian economics is the most radical extremist free market economics that has ever been imagined and has never been implemented and never will be implemented.

Every modern and nearly every recent historical society has been a mixed economy. The only reason the middle class exists is because it was fought for, hard, by explicitly anti-Libertarian structures (new deal style reforms and make-work projects, welfare, healthcare, unions, minimum wages, worker protections, tarrifs, GI bill, universities, very high taxes on the rich and very high corporate taxes, publicly owned infrastructure, bailouts) fighting against or protecting free markets from themselves when they inevitably crash and burn and destroy themselves and the societies around them. Without these protections free markets would annihilate the entire middle class in a heartbeat for the sake of "efficiency" as is their nature (the middle class are by definition not the owners of capital so their concerns are not considered by a capitalist economic structure), a process that is occurring albeit more slowly in the US as we speak. Markets are very powerful engines for generating efficiency, so they are good at building economic engines (through exploitation, of course) while ignoring any and all other concerns or consequences. They are a paperclip maximizer. Not entirely useless tools, but horrifyingly murderous and dangerous ones that have a tenancy to seize power with disastrous results wherever they go.

I think you're describing small-l libertarianism which is a very vague and general theory with many, many offshoots that are so opposed to each other they are unrecognizable as coming from the same ideology (libertarian socialists, the US Libertarian party). Small-l libertarianism is such a weak and universally likeable platitude it practically means nothing at all. It's like being "pro-freedom" or "anti-fascism".

I think GP meant Libertarianism (like the US Libertarian party, more of an AnCap style ideology) which is pretty much only focused on markets and property rights (i.e. protecting the rich) and its calling cards are ignoring any kind of positive rights theory (the proper saying was life, liberty, property -- all negative. Pursuit of happiness, a positive aspirational right, was added when people realized it actually had to work in real life), lack of an account of historical economics and ignoring any kind of coercion or force except explicit physical force (the least common and most ineffective type of coercion found in modern society). It fundamentally opposes any kind of right to "pursuit of happiness" (or happiness at all) for anyone not wealthy and its ideal world is exactly the structure of Eve -- markets govern all, there are no limits on the power of the few rich who own the universe while the poor beg for scraps and generally die. Except Eve is far gentler -- there are no police to assault you if you trespass in the territory of one of the ultrawealthy and take their property, they have to protect it themselves, and death is not permanent.

>see the paragraph following that quote about how some borrowers will win and some will lose.

So, no change? https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/business/dealbook/race-st...

Centralized credit scores can be gamed, easily, helping those who are inclined to game them -- these are currently the "winners". Taking out a debt for no reason and then paying it back on time is a stupid economic decision, but it's great for your credit score.

The minimal increase in efficiency that comes from lenders having all this often incorrect, unaccountable private information about borrowers must be balanced against the damage the big 3 do as well as the damage lenders can do by exploiting the aforementioned information asymmetry it gives them. It comes up pretty short in my view.

Or just delete all 3 from the earth, physically destroy all of their data storage media and let people make loans the way they always have for millennia, without three unaccountable private behemoths stealing and hording private data on every citizen then charging them to see/access/protect it, then cutting costs around security and getting all of it stolen. They do not need to exist and their services are a net negative on society.

Indeed, in fact the FBI is absolutely the last organization we should trust with any oversight over anything of this sort. They have a history of infiltrating as well as explicitly murdering and plotting for the death of leading figures in the American left and in the civil rights movement. They currently spend a huge amount of resources tricking mentally ill Muslims into buying weapons they provide and making some statement about terrorism in order to fabricate thwarted terror attacks. I certainly hope they have changed their tune since COINTELPRO (they claim to have!) and they absolutely do some essential law enforcement work but their headquarters is still named after a disgusting traitor who worked hard primarily to subvert and destroy American democracy. I wouldn't trust similar hypothetical organizations like the Adolf Hitler center for Jewish rights or the Ayn Rand institute for Marxist Theory either. And I certainly wouldn't give any credence to someone at the FBI talking about stifling speech, infiltrating political groups, and propaganda without acknowledging the organization's sordid history doing exactly that to its own people.

The piece reads like whining that the US LE apparatus is now, with the advent of the Internet, having trouble exerting total control over acceptable political discourse in the US, and using scary red-baiting to trick us into giving it back to them. If you pause for a moment and look past all the scary faux-military language like "Perception management operation", what he is saying is that the Russians are posting on the Internet and that this reality is so horrifying, so fundamentally threatening to democracy that we need to tear down the regulations that stop the FBI from controlling what is said online. That is far more terrifying than the prospect that I might have to read some posts that are pro-Russia.

Yes that's correct, any right that you can waive essentially does not exist in a capitalist economic system -- if you can waive it, the poor will inevitably be forced to waive it. However it's encouraging when compared to the situation in the US. It's definitely better that people know than not know.

Indeed: here we see that the 'efficiency' of the market or its ability to solve problems as an organic optimzation machine is a myth. The market is a collection of many dictatorial kings of fiefdoms called small and large businesses, and it expresses the collective will of these kings. Theory says if there is a labor shortage that wages should go up, but the owning class does not wish to raise wages, rather they prefer to keep their proportion of the profit for themselves, and when theory conflicts with the will of the powerful, well...

By active and loud anti-corporate voices do you mean the pro-corporate liberal party, the pro-corporate conservative party, the corporate-owned TV media or the pro-corporate mainstream newspapers? There are anti corporate voices like e.g. Chomsky, Sanders, and they all have a couple of characteristics in common: they are ignored by the powers that be. They are without platforms, and they are without power.

I agree, ignoring the serious problem that is a tiny number of private monopolies owning all of our communication infrastructure (boy, 1996 me hopes those oligarchs don't choose to compromise the privacy or rights of their customers, since we have no other viable options....) the current state of affairs is really not too bad in that a whole bunch of people can get reasonably fast service at reasonable prices.

As far as I know concerns people have with the telecommunications act of 1996 are very serious but they concern primarily media/press consolidation, and allowing for vertical integration, since it provides dangerous incentives for companies to violate net neutrality. And of course people have problems in general with massive consolidation of private power over critical communication infrastructure (see previous paragraph) but I didn't realize there was any worry that it would make things much worse when it comes to "what kind of service can the consumer buy" efficiency related issues.

And since the only ostensibly pro-consumer voice with any power (the FCC) is acting in the interest of major industry players right now, we should give the major industry players complete control forever, even if a pro-consumer administration takes power sometime in the future?

If you think Trump winning had anything to do with safe spaces or whatever gamergate alt-right concerns the 18-34 tech male demographic cares about instead of blatant abject failures of the Democratic party (nominating a horrible candidate and running a horrible campaign), well I've got a bridge to sell you.

Nobody should let Trump winning convince them "well, maybe we should have been more racist".

Safe spaces are not contemptible at all; people who deny them are. Who are you to say I cannot organize with my friends in a place where I let people talk about their problems free of criticism and hate for a moment? Maybe a rape survivor wants to spend a while talking about her experiences with people who are willing to be supportive without having alt-right protesters screaming at her calling her a slut and telling her she deserved it? You can pretend this is about intellectualism, but we all know it isn't; they are about hate and harassment and vile people spewing vile vitriol at others.

And I don't advocate excluding ideas, rather refusing to give ideas that don't deserve respect or attention respect or attention.

>A safe space is a safe free from criticism. Conservatives don't want or need safe spaces. They need spaces free from literal violence and from social violence (calls to firing, disruption of free assemblies, ostrichsization, etc.).

No, they don't want a safe space. They want something much more than that, they want a platform to be given to them. Conservatives are free to sit in private in a frat house or country club and talk about how women are dumb all they want (they do, in fact, all around the country!). But of course they want more. They want to be able to say whatever they damn please, no matter how nasty or non-intellectual, and have people listen to them. They want universities to pay for their security and host them in huge lecture halls, giving a tacit endorsement of them as intellectual figures. They want to be able to publish a manifesto at their work describing how they think their coworkers of a certain gender are too stupid to be here and before you call me sexist look at these statistics I am citing while having no qualifications to talk with any expertise about any of these issues.

I actually don't particularly agree with his firing, because I fundamentally disagree with allowing for the tyranny that is the non-unionized American workplace. Imagine if he were poor and couldn't immediately sprint into the alt-right women-hating neo nazi youtube circuit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN1vEfqHGro) and immediately apply for another tech job. In that case, speaking his mind politically would be suicide (perhaps literally, as he'd lose his health insurance).

So yes, I too disagree with allowing business to fire their employees without cause -- google shouldn't be able to fire its workers for their political positions, and this should be solidified explicitly in a union agreement or government regulation. Google also shouldn't be allowed to force their employees to submit to drug tests, for example. Or to fire their employees for not working weekends. Or for "not stepping up enough" or for a lack of "culture fit".

Remember, studies like this are not opinion pieces about whether or not it should be legal. It's a substance that it has been illegal to study for decades, it's unsurprising there may be previously unknown health risks and it's important to try and understand them.

That being said,

>Support for liberal marijuana use is partly due to claims that it is beneficial and possibly not harmful to health

This is extremely disingenuous. No, support for liberal marijuana use is mostly due to claims that it is less harmful than current legal drugs like alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine, sugar (not that it is not harmful at all), that it has measurable and powerful medicinal uses, and that criminalization of it is the biggest US domestic-policy-based moral catastrophe in decades and has done horrific damage to entire cornerstones of American society (minority groups, the police, civil liberties, the legal system, public health) with the explicitly stated and accomplished goal of targeting political and racial groups.

>If marijuana use is implicated in cardiovascular diseases and deaths, then it rests on the health community and policy makers to protect the public.

No, this is disingenuous and extremely dangerous. If use is implicated in these diseases it rests on the health community and policy makers to educate the public about these risks so they may make informed choices, exactly as they do with alcohol and tobacco and caffeine and sugar and trans fats, and to insulate the public from dangers associated with others making these choices by preventing e.g. driving under the influence or secondary exposure.

The smugness comes from the American left party moving right to try and capture some "center" that does not exist except in the professional and donor class.

The "left wing" party busting unions 60 years ago would be unthinkable. The left wing under FDR, not coincidentally the most popular US president in history, did not hatefully dismiss the poor working class as stupid, it gave them jobs and lifted them up. Rural areas voted Democrat. But we don't have the FDR Democratic party anymore, we have the (Bill) Clinton Democrats. Which is pro-deregulation, pro-incarceration, anti-union, pro-business, anti-worker, pro drug-war, pro-foreign war, pro-austerity (all policies which are bad for the poor, downtrodden, working class people) but they say the right things educated people believe about minorities and talk about how their policy is "evidence based" and boy if you cross them you'll sure face the full force of their weaponized smug.

Trump flanked Clinton from the left on trade. I'll let that sink in. He said he was going to fight for American workers and reject trade deals that helped big business. Clinton waffled about it (because she and the Democrats support it).

I love this article. The Democratic party has a whole lot of smug to offer; if you join them you can feel like you're in the cool kids club, the journalist's club, the wealthy professor's club, the doctor and lawyer and banker's club. You're on the "right" side of things. But beyond a sense of identitarian membership in the "expert, thinking, correct" class, it doesn't have much else to offer.

If you suggest a program to make public college and universities tuition free as it is done in many other countries, the "compromise" response from the democratic party is a means-tested boondoggle: first if you prove to a faceless government bureaucrat that you are poor and get all your paperwork together (which is humiliating and difficult) then tuition is waived. Which is completely out of touch with the attitudes of the poor; if you ever talk to a poor person, the difference between a handout they have to beg for by admitting their poverty and a universal program that everyone gets just for being an American (like roads, police, etc) is the difference between visceral humiliation they will refuse to face or hate using and something they can get behind.

Look at the new slogan: better skills, better jobs, better wages. Skills first of course, implying the under and unemployed are lacking skills. Implying skills retraining programs (and not job creation programs, like the new deal) actually work. Implying there are actually jobs for those workers once they get "skilled-up". Implying people who currently have good jobs and are wealthy are there primarily because they are skilled (there are plenty of pundits and opinion authors at famous newspapers and middle managers at large companies whose continued employment directly contradicts this theory). Implying a corporate tax cut is designed to help workers. On and on and on. The democratic party is smug towards workers because it considers itself above them. It isn't the party of the workers anymore, it's the party of the people who think workers are stupid.

>We're still sorry for having given you a case of Acute Thatcherism, America

I've never heard a European apologize for this and didn't realize how much I wanted to until I did; thank you, we hope to one day recover.

And I agree with you to some extent. But many 'conservatives' today are not approaching these issues with any kind of intellectual honesty or a willingness to respect their opponents. When I think campus protests I think Milo, who spews hate with every turn and is in no way intellectual or thoughtful. I think of Richard Spencer, who should be shouted down. Our society hates neo-nazis and while we shouldn't be violent towards them, the clearer it can get that they are universally loathed the better. I should not have to sit and listen to someone advocate gassing minorities, for example, and sit there and politely debate. Their positions aren't reasonable and acknowledging them as a serious intellectual position and putting them on a stage is doing them a favor they should not get.

A simple "yes" would suffice. All you have to do is admit that diversity is good and you'll get your diversity of ideology there for free. All you have to do is admit that creating safe spaces can be good or necessary, and you can argue for safe spaces for conservatives to speak their minds.

The point isn't that you shouldn't be allowed to express yourself (you should! There should be a safe space for conservatives on campus! There are many in fact, they're called the local frat house, young republicans club, economics study group, bible study) the point is that when you argue that you should be able to do so you use the same arguments conservatives so nastily deride like diversity, participation trophies, snowflakes, safe spaces, etc.

The fact that you whine about anyone disagreeing with you being some bogeyman you call "the Left" (which does not exist of course) is telling; instead, you should consider your discussion partners as people instead of the enemy, perhaps then you will provide arguments that are not you just stating the thing you desperately want to be true over and over again and we can all learn something.

No, the critiques (at least that I've seen here) are ridiculous; HN is generally conservative STEM majors who have never studied anything seriously outside their tiny box of CS/engineering and possibly math/physics and think everything they don't understand is beneath them. It shows in this thread, it's almost painfully cringe-inducing to read. In order to make a reasonable critique of a field, you must first understand it, something which nearly zero HNers even make an attempt to do. They dismiss it out of hand without argument because it is not STEM and therefore not "rigorous" enough to even be considered by their superior STEM brains.

Are there problems in these fields? Sure, there are problems in every field. But I haven't seen a single reasonable point here or otherwise that provides a good reason for mistrusting the vast consensus among a wide variety of very smart people who have spent their entire lives studying these issues and instead trusting JavaProgrammer37 who stomps his feet and insists women just aren't smart like him, smart enough to write SQL queries.

>No disrespect to anyone, but can an average career teacher understand the nuances of securities law?

Yes they can, that's exactly the position I outlined. After a week of doing nothing but learning about securities law every teacher I've met is capable of this no problem. Teachers are perhaps a bad example here though, they are highly educated (many have masters' degrees, most have bachelors) and interested in learning. But to make your argument stronger, take a minimum wage fast food worker with a GED, yes I think they are capable as well.

>Lawyers and prosecutors are great at creating stories, but isn't what matters or not whether the law has been broken?

Kind of. In fact in the US legal system this is not all that matters, because the law is often vague and abstract and sometimes obviously morally wrong. The purpose of the jury is exactly this, it's a check on a cold soulless system destroying lives robotically; not only must a law be broken, but you also have to convince a group of fairly normal human beings that what you've done is horrible enough you deserve to be punished for it before you are punished.

>Amazing charismatic lawyers (or prosecutors) will be able to bend an outcome, and that is just not right.

I agree with you here, and this essentially means the rich get away with things the poor are punished for. This will always happen, will it not? People who are able to present a more convincing argument in their defense are less likely to be convicted in any legal system? I think things can be done to mitigate this, yes, and they start with a simpler criminal code (fewer crimes) and more equal access to legal talent, like better funded public defenders.

These things can be (and are) explained. Trials that contain complex technical violations tend to take longer, sure. Judges, expert witnesses, lawyers all spend a huge amount of time learning about/explaining these issues. It's especially incumbent upon the prosecutor to explain complicated issues -- if the jury can't understand someone's guilt, they are less likely to consider someone guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Which is very, very good: it sets the bar higher for conviction, and it encourages the state to, if it wants to convict, make simpler clearer laws. Complex morasses of incomprehensible laws are not necessary and only serve the interests of those who can pay to create or avoid them.

Also, none of these subjects are so difficult and complicated ordinary people cannot understand them. I've never heard of a trial requiring any real deep knowledge, like requiring jurors to have a serious understanding algebraic geometry or quantum mechanics or phenomenology. Hacking can be explained to ordinary people. People are not dumb. People do their own taxes and understand taxes. Trained professionals are not elite superheroes who are the only ones who can understand the world well enough to understand the difference between right and wrong. Untrained people can't do a professional's job, but they can definitely (with some help and background) tell when a professional has committed a crime. This case is easily understandable. I'm not a securities expert but I can make a fine assessment here just from reading an article, even without hours and hours of doing nothing but learning about the specific case and law (which is what jurors get); we all know what fraud is.

You're right the US has a huge incarceration rate, but jury trials have nothing to do with this, since in the US trials functionally do not exist. I don't remember the numbers exactly (and they are changing and they differ by state/federal) but something like 1-5% of people thrown in jail actually go to trial.

Yes, now white supremacists trying to make sure brown people die in the ocean using patreon funds are conservative journalists. Won't anyone think of free speech? Next he'll ban patreon crowdfunding the creation of snuff films, what a monster. It's almost like he doesn't want to be knowingly complicit in murder.

I'll give you this, though, the man is devious -- can you imagine the mental gymnastics involved in watching a video proudly filmed and posted online by these people of them doing a thing and discussing that very thing in the middle of doing it? And using that as evidence? Truly disgusting.

I think you misunderstand fundamentally, GP is saying that no matter the position of the current government there are absolute inalienable rights which is a common position to take (outlined in the founding of the US, for example) and that there is indeed a higher authority than government, morality/religion/philosophy/humanism. Some consider, e.g. the UN declaration of human rights to enumerate rights which can be violated by governments even though you cannot go to the UN for redress.

You are considering a 'right' to be defined as 'a thing the particular current government allows you to do' which is a great technical legal definition in service of blind unquestioning obedience to the powerful and is a nice clean enunciation of the universally rejected philosophical principle "might is right" but is actually the exact opposite of what most people mean when they refer to rights. The law (even highest law of the land) and its enforcers can violate your rights and you can defend your rights by refusing to obey unjust law, for example. The whole point of saying a right exists is to define what it means for a government to be evil or oppressive; to deny natural rights. To say rights are defined by what the government permits is to say no government can ever be evil or oppressive, and that it justifies itself by its power and nothing more, an idea we rejected hundreds of years ago as a race when we moved past the divine right of kings.

For some the vote was simply an expression of their hatred for centrist/liberal/media elites and pundit class who look down on them. If you look at polls, lots of Trump supporters voted for him because of political correctness. If you listen to them, you hear about gleefully reveling in "liberal tears". Plenty of people voted for him exactly because him winning hurt people they hate and really little else beyond that.

And I think you underestimate the pure hatred for Hillary Clinton. Far more voted against her than for him. When your life is miserable and your community is dying and a rich lady you've hated for decades tells you "America is already great" (this was actually her slogan!), well....

Imagine being a truck driver and watching this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YttscNOoAjA

Finally, at the end of the day your rank and file republicans are just going to go to the polls and check the box next to 'R' like they always do, no matter what. Religious republicans will say a prayer when they do it, poor ones will convince themselves he'll help them, moderate ones will convince themselves Hillary is worse. You'd sooner convert one of them than convince a lifelong fan to change their favorite sports team. Similar with democrats.

To be fair, the entire political spectrum in America is far right of anything in any other developed country. And so I agree with you, not all right-leaning people are unreasonable, take the US Democratic party, who I am to the left of but I consider reasonable. They are right-leaning -- they are a pro-business centrist conservative party. Democrats are so conservative they do not even support universal healthcare. Imagine in your country if the left wing party proudly campaigned to deny healthcare to the poor, but the right wing campaigned to deny healthcare to even more poor people and to give that money to the ultrawealthy. We have an actual left wing and its policy positions are popular if you take polls but there is almost no political representation of it or platform for it in traditional media.

It's tempting to pull out "both sides" rhetoric because reasonable people sympathize with others and try to see things from their point of view and assume since they believe something, there must be a grain of truth to it so they always feel like they should compromise. The problem is unreasonable people (or simply malicious ones) will take advantage of this impulse every single time and have been for decades. "But both sides!" is the climate that guarantees it's going to be impossible to have a rational or reasonable debate about political issues -- approaching a political debate assuming a compromise is inevitable and the other side is just as reasonable as you are is just accepting defeat before a single word is spoken. In this context, if both parties approach it with good faith debate can happen, but if not (as is our current situation) whoever is the most extreme always wins.

Yes, life is horrifying for people on minimum wage. Why not make life better for people out of prison rather than exploit people in prison and then hold them up by comparison to the free but brutally impoverished ones and say "look how great you have it, you're not doing slave labor!"

Supposedly rehabilitation is a goal of prison; how nice would it be if prisoners walked out with a small nest egg, to help them get settled and survive while they go through the impossibly difficult task of finding a job with a criminal record? Right now, it's very tempting to go straight back into crime or drugs since these are the only career opportunities available. Maybe saving at minimum wage for 5 years would give them enough money to for the first time in their life feel safe, or enough capital to invest in something that could make their lives better, like tools, a business, etc. Maybe they could get some fulfillment and feel like they are part of a social unit by sending money back to their family while in prison. Maybe if they are paid the market value of their labor they will develop confidence that their labor is worth something and a viable alternative to, say, crime.

And yes prison is expensive for the state, but that's the state's problem and provides no justification for exploitation. The state can't do something unspeakable to you like lock you in a cage to be beaten and raped for decades and then make you pay for it. If prison is too expensive, the state should imprison fewer people. There are far more economically efficient alternatives to locking up millions and throwing away the key (like improving conditions for the poor!); the state is making a stupid, cruel, and horrible choice and it should pay the full price for it or it has no incentive to make a better one.