I’ve written before about the godawful rat race many highly educated academics suffer through: the ghastly adjunct position, in which you’re paid a small sum to teach a class, and the only way to make a living is to teach many courses piecemeal, often at a variety of different colleges. Well, it turns out that there could be a worse system: Southern Virginia University is advertising for volunteer professor positions.
Volunteer Professors. For almost two decades generous volunteers at Southern Virginia University have enriched the lives of students, faculty, and staff in a variety of ways. For example, distinguished retired professors have taught a host of classes in such areas as English composition and literature, classics and foreign languages, creative writing, communications, chemistry, family and child development, and Russian literature.
You could teach a class…for free! But the university does offer some recompense: you get to stay in an apartment, no charge, and they will generously give you five free meals a week. I guess you have to fast through the weekend, but they probably don’t expect you to teach then, either.
Just imagine: you could get years of training in some difficult discipline, and then your reward is a few hots and a cot while you train some young people to go on to assume your exalted position someday.
I wonder if the students at SVU ever consider the example of their underpaid professors, or if they don’t think that far ahead and just appreciate the fact that it saves them a few bucks on their tuition right now.
Wow.
First thought after looking at the school’s wiki page: Mormons. Second thought: Orson Scott Card teaches somewhere … really? Third thought: how likely is it that he’s a volunteer professor too, or does the system “work” because only the right teachers are paid?
And of course for every volunteer professor, that’s another adjunct who is out of a job, making it even harder to make ends meet.
Orson Scott Card is independently wealthy. His Ender books have been selling very well since the first one was published in 1985.
What’re you worried about, PZ? The invisible hand of the free market will resolve any problems.
Oh yeah, the invisible hand of the free market only works when all parties to a transaction have full knowledge about it.
Oh yeah, & when they are all equally powerful too.
…so, to balance this up, SVU charges students nothing more than a proportional share of the cost of housing and feeding the professor and paying for the classroom, right? Tuition there must be conveniently under $5000/year, then! Great!
Oh, wait, no, it’s over $18000. Gee, I wonder where the extra money goes…
Administration costs, of course. Can’t get good Chancellors if you aren’t willing to pay what they are worth.
I note their fine example of ‘distinguished retired professors’ who have previously acted as volunteer professors.
The cynic says that the cost savings will never be applied to the tuition cost; only increase the profits of the execs. Even academe is driven by greenbacks for the executives; the workers and ‘clients’ never see a dime.
Just camouflage, by selling it as: the boost-in-prestige is the invisible payment (non taxable) for services rendered. With the enticement of a lead professor getting to slap his name on every paper produced by their students, with associated patents and licensing fees to then result, as “bonus”.
What could go wrong. [Clarkson voice]
“Professor Myers – if I study biology for 8 years, and get a Phd, and run up $100,000 in student loans – what kind of salary can I hope to make”
“Mmmm – well the chicken fried steak at the cafeteria is really good you know”
dick @4
Of course! Sponsoring corporations could pay the profs salaries directly out of the spirit of altruism and not try to influence the outcome. What could possibly go wrong?
I thought about volunteering, but the university wanted to treat me like crap. I would get the courses no paid prof wanted, and would get absolutely no support. They told me I’d have to clean my own office.
Since I wasn’t costing them anything, they figured my time was worthless. Nice!
Well, if everyone chipped in a few hours of voluntary work every day, say 10-20, for a couple of years or decades that ought to boost overall productivity and make the US the greatestest country ever, just like that Bush fellow suggested. And then, somehow, everyone will be rich and well-off.
Ah, capitalism. You get to
slave awaywork in the acid mines earning the respect of your fellow (hu)man as well as perks such as half a bowl of thin gruel every other day, free exercise and, of course, membership in motivational programmes such as WHIP and L.A.S.H.Someone has to organise this, however, so I’ll be on the top floor in the lavishly decorated office making sure everything runs smoothly. Oh, and my position is far too important to leave it to volunteers so don’t get any ideas. Also, my salary is subject to my own discretion. (This avoids conflicts of interest with third parties)
I spent 5 years as a graduate student. I had completed my Masters and was well into a PhD, when I finally got sick of working incredibly long hours and knowing that I had at best limited job prospects at the end. I knew PhD’s who could only keep jumping from one post-doc position to another, and basically functioning as over-qualified lab-techs because few academic positions were available.
I was looked down upon by some professors when I finally bailed out and went to medical school, but I made no apologies. (And BTW medical school was less difficult than grad studies.) If universities want people to persue academic research careers, maybe they should stop treating those who do so like garbage.
consciousness razor (#1) –
I also looked at the wikipedia page, and see that the endowment for the entire place is US$900,000. It sounds like they’re desperate to keep costs down.
http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/06/09/southern-virginia-university-mormonism-and-the-liberal-arts-experience/
Also of note is the very extensive (and expensive) sports website for a D3 school.
Interesting the amount of criticism this job posting has received here. What exactly is so bad/wrong about it? They advertise for a position with very little salary (paid in the form of room and board) while stating right in the job description that this would be a good job for a retired professor with (presumably) multiple other streams of income. No one is forced to accept this position. The people who apply, interview, and ultimately accept the job do so of their own free will. And the school apparently has a twenty year track record of people wanting the position. Why is this horrible?
Also, if capitalism and the endless pursuit of money is evil, then shouldn’t “a few hots and a cot” be all the compensation one needs for a job of this importance? Why should this professor receive any monetary compensation at all?
This, btw, is just funny:
I didn’t realize North Korea was a capitalist country…
Funny how these sorts of things – WHIP and L.A.S.H. – only seem to happen in autocratic economies where really smart people (college professor types, perhaps) think they know what’s best for the rest of society.
If anyone has any lingering doubt about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of libertarianism, just reread comment 17.
Tom Weiss being stuipid
Its what happens when those in power in companies want to return to slave labor. It’s what the RWA and liberturds like yourself want. Otherwise, you would worry about results, not about how it happens.
I find this curious, I know that college costs are skyrocketing while, at the same time, salaries for educators have dropped dramatically. So clearly, all of the new money going to Universities is not going to professor salaries.
Somehow I think it’s all the money being siphoned off to for profit “colleges” to teach non-accredited basket weaving.
A religion founded on fraud, which teaches that service brings eternal rewards, asks its believers for volunteer service. Tom Weiss has noooo problem with this.
No one is surprised.
Re #17:
Thank you, I do try. If you’re interested you might also consider joining one of the WHIPLASH schemes that are part of several high impact research initiatives carried forward by the automotive industry. Carried forward at high velocity, that is, into a brick wall. As a perk you get to drive the latest cars, often even before they reach the market.
(Under the circumstances I feel compelled to point out that the previous paragraph is not meant to be taken seriously)
Since we do live in a capitalist system you can’t get around paying people for their work on account of them starving otherwise.* Ethical conflict, but capitalism really isn’t that big on ethics unless it affects the bottom line.
It’s already been pointed out that every volunteer unretired prof basically puts one more adjunct out of a job with even less of a slim chance of ever getting anywhere career-wise.
Similar concerns apply to volunteers which is why, in the EU, companies have to pay their interns somewhat reasonable wages and place restrictions on how long a contract lasts. People say they hate it because in many fields they need those internships to get anywhere but they need the regulations just as much because else companies would happily use ‘long-term’ interns for just about anything they could get away with, paying sixpence a week, if that. Not because it’s nice providing all that ‘free work experience’ to people but because it’s good for the bottom line.
In a capitalist society time is money. So you ought to pay people accordingly. No excuses and no half-baked perks. Those five meals in the opening post barely amount to a tenner in the supermarket, all for a week’s worth of labour.
*More correctly, you shouldn’t be able to get around paying people a living wage. As I understand it the US still struggle with the notion of paying a minimum wage you can actually live on.
@22
and @
Each of these comments demonstrates a vicousness bordering on evil. It is very likely you don’t see it as evil, but that’s exactly what it is.
So you ought to pay people accordingly….based on what? What standard of value should we use to judge how much a person’s time is worth? If I am willing to pay someone one dollar for an hour of work, and that person is willing to work for one hour for one dollar, if that person being paid accordingly? Yes.
That person is being paid according to their standard of value for their time, not yours. No one has coerced that person, no one has the muzzle of a gun pointed at their back urging them to take the job or else. That person decides, freely, either to take the job or not to take it. The person offering the job likewise decides whether to offer more or less based on the value they wish to receive for their money. This transaction is the most moral of all possible transactions, one that is entered into freely by both parties for their mutual benefit.
The transactions you’re describing are amoral and, in their extreme, dispicably evil. You would point a gun at the back of the employer and force them to pay an employee more than they would otherwise offer. The person receiving the job, noting the gun pointed at the back of the employer, clamours for more because he sees the employer is in no position to refuse. This, komarov, is what you should not be able to do – to use the full weight and force of government to enforce a standard of value upon two people, the employer and the employee, who do not share it.
The free exchange of goods and services is the most ethical way of ordering society because it is free and not coered at the point of a gun. Ah but why bring up guns, you might protest, the government won’t actually shoot you an employer if they break one of the myriad federal, state, and local employment regulations currently choking them. All laws, all regulation, is enforced by the barrel of a gun even though that gun isn’t often visible (just ask Eric Gardner). This is the weapon you would wield against two people simply trying to conduct a business transaction each of their own free will.
So tell me again which of us is morally and intellectually bankrupt?
If this university can attact suitable professors and pay them in room and board, then that’s exactly what those professors are worth (or they could perhaps be offering their time as charity). If that means that another adjunct doesn’t have a job opportunity because they believe they are worth more than this college is offering and refuse to take the position, then in the aggregate this is what’s called a market signal. The supply of professors is greater than the demand for them and prices go down. This in turn signals a certain percentage of those seeking university positions that perhaps they should try another industry, and it signals a certain number of undergrads/grad students that perhaps they’re not entering a field with the best prospects for future job security.
All of these things happen not because some bureaucrat in a government office in Washington decides how many adjunct professors there will be this year. It happens because a thousand different people receive a thousand different signals which affect their decisions in a thousand different ways – chaotic and complex ways that a bureaucrat could never model with a thousand supercomputers. The end result of all of these individual, freely arrived at decisions is an improvement in the standard of living of all. And yet you would actively seek to undermine this system and replace it with a system whereby more and more of these free interactions are governed by the muzzle of a gun – there are too many transactions right now governed that way but the system is resilient enough to keep generating wealth and helping people lift themselves out of poverty. For how long, I can’t tell.
Not for much longer, I would guess, if your amorality is allowed to prevail.
@Tom Weiss #23
You can see only one power possible form of coercion and power imbalance, and that involves pointing of guns? You really do not realise, that without governmental regulation there is also a power imbalance between employees and employers (and it really does not stack the odds against the emploeyers) and absence of regulations allows employers to use other forms of coercion – like instead of pointing a gun at people and saying “if you do not do this job for subpar salary, you get shot” they say “if you do not do this job for do this job for subpar salary, you can starve to death”. Its the same difference, yet you seem no to see it.
The system you propose does not help people to lift themselves from poverty. That system only helps those who are richt to get richer (because the power imbalance favors them already) and the poor to become slaves in all but name.
There are instances where government regulations can and do and will go bad, I do not think anyone here disputes that. But proposing that we therefore should abandond them completely for the asserted (but never actualy demonstrated) beneficial properties of the ill defined and elusive “free market” is throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Your view of the world is beyond the horizont of “simplistic” and still accelerating.
I only wish that americans were less succesful in exporting this libertarian crap to Europe, because it starts to fuck it up over here.
The world is actually more nuanced than that and while some things are better left alone to emerge from the socioeconomical interactions in the market, some things in the market must be regulated (=bananced) from the outside, otherwise it comes to a stable, but broken state. This is ne sure way to start violent and bloody revolts.
I try an analogy: In order for a machine to function, you must keep it in an unstable state – you must input energy, you must adjust and regulate the inputs in order to maximize the overall outputs. If you do not do that, you might get a short peak in input before the machine reaches stable state. That stable state being broken unfunctioning mess, where you have no other option than to start over again from scratch.
I suspect you will not get it, based on previous experience in discussions with people like you, but someone else might.
Damn, proof reading fail. “bananced” should be “balanced” and “ne sure way” should be “one sure way” and “peak in input before” should be “peak in output before”.
Fuck you Tom Weiss, and I mean that sincerely. Your whole immoral worldview is a race to the bottom. I’m sure from previous encounters with you that you don’t understand power differentials at all so you don’t understand my comments and why you are wrong. In your idiotic world view, the only entity that has power is government, never mind that the only university in a large environment has a larger power base than individual academics who live there. Actually, maybe you do understand it but you think it is a good thing. Again, fuck you.
Tom Weiss, #23
Not this shit again.
Also, off-topic but since you brought it up: Garner wasn’t killed because of the enforcement of laws or regulations, since the punishment for the alleged crime of selling untaxed cigarettes isn’t public execution by asphyxiation. He was killed because racist cops wanted to murder a black person.
So says the morally bankrupt liberturd without empathy, intellect, knowledge of history, knowledge of economics, knowledge of politics, and knowledge of dealing with people. Your amorality cannot be allowed to prevail Thanks for showing us what abject losers liberturds are. You a great example of a sloganeering idiotology without redeeming features.
Tom Weiss, #23
If a fast food restaurant can attract suitable cashiers and pay them a wage that is nearly impossible to support a family on, then that’s exactly what those cashiers are worth (or they could perhaps be offering their time as charity). If that means that another cashier doesn’t have a job opportunity because they believe they are worth more than this restaurant is offering and refuse to take the position, then in the aggregate this is what’s called a market signal. The supply of cashiers is greater than the demand for them and prices go down. This in turn signals a certain percentage of those seeking cashier positions that perhaps they should try another industry.
Down with minimum wage!
The world is just so simple for the rich white dude. He sees unpulled bootstraps everywhere.
Bullshit.
The thing you ignore here is the concept of private property, which is an abstraction enforced at gunpoint just as much as any other legal concept you care to name (often rather more literally and directly than most), and which means that your potential employee here is being coerced, by the threat of starvation, at gunpoint. You can’t have the food you need to live because it the law says it belongs to somebody else, and we will shoot you if you try to take it.
Including the law of ownership. Without law, there is no property, and without property, your beloved market does not exist, and nor does the concept of “wealth”.
Now, if you want to postulate a form of libertarianism without the concept of private property, I’m all ears…
Don’t be ridiculous, Dunc. Clearly, the laws establishing and protecting private property are nothing like the laws governing employment, and they are laws that are necessary. How can you tell the difference? Easy – property laws put rich white people at an advantage.
Instead of asking me to fuck off, you could perhaps examine your own premises and see if you can see the truth in what I am saying.
The cops may have been racist, but they were there to talk to him that day because he was selling untaxed cigarettes. I’m not convinced the cops wanted to kill him that day but I am convinced they were there to enforce that regulation – backed up with the power of the guns in their holsters. Were they simply there to have a discussion, or offer a suggestion, no force would have been applied.
That is exactly my point. How many cashiers, in your example, do not have jobs because the minimum wage in Seattle, for example, is $15 (http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/03/16/we-are-seeing-the-effects-of-seattles-15-an-hour-minimum-wage/). Is being unemployed better, in your value system, than making $10 an hour?
What a dispicable racist argument. You should be ashamed.
Private property is the farthest thing from an abstraction. For example, PZ has written a book. He toiled for weeks, months, years perhaps to put the words together. He chose to write the book. He chose the subject matter. He chose the words (assuming he didn’t plagiarize). Does not the book belong to him? Should you or I have some claim of ownership to that book? Of couse not, its ludicrous to think otherwise. If you want to postulate some form of societal organization that (1) doesn’t include the concept of private property and (2) hasn’t caused the deaths of millions of people through starvation or genocide in the past, I’m all ears.
You’re assuming a world in which there is only one employer. If there is even one other employer, the result is a market for labor in which the employers try to attract the best talent for their money. In the US, where the free market has created hundreds of thousands of employers, a power equilibrium would develop even without the interference of the government. With the advent of the internet both employers and employees have more information and more power at their disposal than ever before.
The employee can see that Company A is offering a better job than Company B without leaving the house. They can often apply, interview, and land the job without leaving the house (which is what happened to me). Employers can gather data about the market value of jobs, the background of potential employees, etc. all without leaving the office.
If any company were to say the things you write or act in a manner like you describe – it would be all over social media within minutes. But your logic is worse than that. No company can force anyone to starve to death. “If you do not do this job for do this job for [sic] subpar salary, you can starve to death” is nonsensical, because the only entity capable of legally backing up a threat like that with force is the government. A company says “do this job for [what you consider to be] subpar salary” and you say “no.” Case closed. You move on to company C, or company D (I applied for well over 100 jobs last time) until you find something where your interests and the companies interests align.
And then you both willingly engage in commerce for a sum you both agree to of your own free will.
Are people backed into a corner due to life circumstances? Do they think they have little to no options? Certainly, and you can argue that salaries are perhaps not as responsive to market signals as I’d like to believe. But you’ll have a hard time convincing me there is a more moral system.
It does and it has. The work of Deirdre McCloskey is absolutely conclusive on this point (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deirdre_McCloskey). Freedom lifts people from poverty – centralization and government control makes people poorer.
Tom Weiss, #32
Master gives us scraps to eat but it sure is better than nothing! Yeah, that’s a wonderful argument against minimum wage. Really makes your libertarian fantasy land look like a paradise.
You think Eric Garner’s death was due to the regulation on cigarette sales? Hahaha.
Oh, look at you squirm!
Dunc is spot on. The law protecting private property is enforced by the barrel of the gun. It just happens to be in favor of the rich and privileged so you’re okay with it. Are laws being enforced by the gun bad or good? You can’t have it both ways. Laws that protect the property of the privileged rich greedy people = good. Laws that try to look out for the others = bad. What a fucking joke libertarianism is.
That’s not racism, you dumb shit.
Just when would this power equilibrium develop? I think the world has been waiting a while. You libertarian assholes only speak in theoretical terms. Who gives a shit what actually happens, right? Don’t regulate the rich and powerful. Just let the rich and powerful regulate the poor.
How is libertarianism different from sociopathy?
Tom Weiss, unless you can show 30 years of liberturd policies being used in a first world country in the last century, you need to face the FACT that your idiotology doesn’t work, and first world countries know that. Your idiotology is used by third world hellholes with oligarchs and no upward movement.
But then, liberturds, like communists, don’t care about facts. They only care about idiotology.
You are also a bigot, if your policies don’t end bigotry, but reinforce them. Which they do.
@Tom Weiss # 33
I am assuming no such thing. You clearly do not read for comprehension, as evidenced by your further writing.
You are using the words “freedom” and “free will” in a rather naive matter, seeing it only in the legislative, written meaning of the word. Many people cannot “apply, interview, and land the job without leaving the house” because their real freedom is reduced by being born into poverty, by being currently sick, by living in an area where ther is only a limited supply of employers. Increasing the freedoms of the rich and powerfull through reduction/abandonment of regulations does not increase the freedom of poor people, because their freedoms are restricted by more substantial things – like the need to eat, have shelter and pay bills on time.
Your life experience is not typical of other people and it is rather arrogant (and logically fallatious – a hasty generalization). Either you vere privileged, or lucky, but do not presume that everyone has the luxury to apply for 100 jobs before landing one that not only pays the bills but also allows for actual living.
At the very least in order for the system you so naively propose to work there have to be antitrust/anti monopoly market regulations in place, otherwise it would not work, as actually shown by historical events.
Do not use arguments from authority as “proof”. Show me the study, with actual data, where the proof is, not wiki article about the person who allegedly has proven it (hint – writing something in a book with convincingly sounding and confident rhethoric does not make a proof of anything).
Interesting choice of example, since intellectual property is one of the most difficult and complex (not to mention abstract) kinds of property to adequately define, and since it also lets you nicely equivocate between the content of the book and the actual physical object. In modern copyright law, the interaction between the rights and claims of the author, publisher, and distributor can actually get rather complex. I get the feeling you’ve never had to speak to a copyright lawyer…
And my point is not that anybody else should have a claim of ownership, it’s that the whole concept of ownership is an abstraction.
Let’s bring it back to a rather more concrete example, and one directly pertinent to the actual point I was making: food. Where does the claim of ownership over a specific handful of grain originally come from? The stuff just grows out of the ground. Does it belong to the person who owns the ground it grew on? The person who planted the seeds it grew from? The person who harvested the grain? The person who employs either of the previous two people? Somebody else? Where does the claim of ownership over the land, or the seeds, or the water needed to grow them come from?
I’m not the one making utopian claims here, and I’m not actually arguing against the concept of private property. I’m merely pointing out that your claim that nobody is being coerced is incompatible with the existence of private property, if you define the law as coercion. (A point that you completely failed to address, I note.) I’m trying to point out the incoherence of your own arguments, rather than advancing any of my own.
[Aside: the “laissez fair” capitalism of the 19th Century (which is the closest historical model we have for what you’re proposing) was remarkably good at causing the deaths of millions of people through starvation and genocide, so if we’re going to resort to argument from consequences, you’re not likely to fair very well.]
@chigau #35.
In the spelling.
I’d like to take that statement and put it in a museum with a little label:
“Problem in a Nutshell”.
1) The problem is still that companies – which are in a position of power – will spend as little money as possible to make as much money as possible. If they could get away with paying a worker sixpence and an old shoe to boil and eat they would.
A highly skilled worker is in theory able to tell the company that they’d sooner work elsewhere unless they get a decent wage but even for the most mobile that notion is – at the very best of times – impractical. Who wants to change jobs constantly because they’re sick of being gouged? But the reality is that most workers do not have even that luxury, as others have explained. It’s sixpence and boiled leather or nothing at all. Fine choices, truly. Which bring me to
2) If, as a company, you hire someone to work long hours for you they do, in effect, spend their life in service to you so you can make profit. In return, by any reasonable ethical standard, you owe them the money they need to live in decent circumstances.
Hence minimum wages. Living on a dollar an hour? Preposterous. Yes, humans are expensive but that’s tough luck. You don’t get to use those human beings and then turn around and say meh, too expensive, I’m not paying for that.
But since you seem to like black-and-white thinking – take the job that pays too little or get nothing at all – let’s apply that to the ‘horrific’ Situation in Seattle: either pay your staff the minimum wage or close shop. Your choice, isn’t it? No doubt soon there won’t be a single restauraunt or fast food chain left in Seattle. Not one, all because a low minimum wage was raised marginally. Oh, the humanity.
*Note: Originally I wrote ‘full time’ here but don’t want a derail in a part time vs full time employment. For my argument the key point is that people invest a lot of time working jobs and whether they spend that time on several part time jobs or one single full time job shouldn’t make a difference to the net result: a reasonable (total) wage allowing a decent living standard with some stability.
Tom Weiss
Unlike you I have actually a degree in economics. No point in arguing with an ideologue who isn’t aware of the most basic stuff he chooses to spout BS about.
My positions are evidence-based, as have been my arguments. I am open to be persuaded – so persuade me. But your comments thus far on this thread have been value judgements – I am immoral and libertarianism is intellectually bankrupt – you have chosen not to deal with my arguments. Curious for someone with a degree in economics and even more curious if my positions are so easy to refute.
Saad –
I did not address the question of whether laws enforced by the gun are good or bad – I did not think that is was Dunc was asking. I instead dealt with his silly characterization of private property.
Laws must ultimately be enforced by the gun, but a society without laws is anarchy. The purpose of a government should be to enforce those laws which maximize the liberty of its citizens. That those laws are enforced by a gun is a necessary evil, but consider the nature of those laws – only in relatively rare circumstances, like to provide for the common defense, would the government make a claim on a citizen.
Take a look at your phrasing – “laws that try to look out for the others”. It is a dishonesty demanded by authoritarians. It is not possible or desirable to legislate morality. It is not moral to enforce at the point of a gun your standard of what the meaning of “look out for” is. And even worse – the last half century have shown us that laws like that don’t work! How long have we been fighting a “war on poverty”? At least since the Johnson administration.
The best thing you can do to “look out for the others” is, in my view and the view of economic history, to leave them alone. Give them the tools to look after themselves. Don’t make them dependant upon the state.
Speaking of incoherence…
That wasn’t your original argument but it sounds interesting. The point you’re missing is the libertarian objects to the initiation of force – not necessarily force itself. If I trade you X for Y and we both agree to it, then you decide after the trade has been made to take Y back, then I can use force to either prevent you from doing so or to recover the item. You have initiated the force – by stealing – and the libertarian can respond in kind. The government initiates force through laws or regulations designed to regulate the free interactions of its citizens – the government initiated force on Eric Gardener for example when he was violating no one’s liberty and engaging in free trade of goods.
First, I’m not proposing anything, merely pointing out the benefits of freedom vs. authoritarianism. Second, I’d ask you to support this assertion because the reality, in my understanding, is quite the opposite. “Capitalism” is incapable of genocide and if it somehow caused starvation, well that would be a first. Socialism and communism are the typically the causes of starvation.
Problem in a nutshell agreed – but its your problem.
Companies have only as much power as the government – or the workers (voluntarily) – give them. Companies are, like consumers, looking for value but they will pay handsomely to get capabilities if they need to. The labor market is just that, a market, and some things like general unskilled labor are plentiful and (should be) cheap. Almost anyone can be a fry cook, the first job I had at 16, and the wages paid to those who hold that position should be reflective of that fact.
But a company is not going to pay a Director of Operations, for example, the same as a fry cook. Because the person who accepts that position for that level of pay isn’t likely to have the skills necessary to perform the job.
This is an inversion of the meaning of the word “ethical.” If I hire someone to work hours, long or short, and they agree to work for me I owe them nothing other than the agreed upon salary. If they decide they cannot feed or support their family for what I am willing to pay, it is then up to me to decide whether to pay them what they are asking or to refuse. Any outside third party telling one side or the other what they must do is the unethical one. They are the one forcing their standards on the other two people involved in the transaction.
That’s not how economics works. Some shops will close, and some have closed in response to the rise in minimum wage. What you’re also going to see is more automation. Why have a server when a Siri-enabled iPad can take your order and your payment, or something else along those lines. If you increase the cost of labor artificially, you give companies greater incentive to look for alternatives.
Don’t try and tell me what my original argument was. My original argument was that people are coerced to accept employment on whatever terms are available by the fact that they cannot provide food and shelter for themselves and their families in any other way, ultimately because the land which provides those resources is owned by somebody else.
Do you not realise that every claim to land ownership (which is the basis on which all other claims of ownership eventually rest, at least as far as material goods are concerned) ultimately derives from a bunch of guys with weapons turning up and saying “We own this now, and we will kill anybody who disagrees”? You live in a country which was quite literally stolen at gunpoint from its original inhabitants. All claims of legal title rest on the initiation of force. Nobody made the land they claim to own, and without the claim to land ownership, there is no basis to claim to own any resources extracted from it.
You’re basically ignoring the entire foundation of society, and saying “OK, from this point onwards, when all the key resources which enable life have already been seized by force in the most literal way imaginable and concentrated into the hands of a tiny minority, any attempt to initiate force, however theoretical or dissipated, in order to redistribute those resources in a more equitable fashion, is out of bounds.” It’s like starting a game of Monopoly by handing all of the property on the board and most of the money in the bank to one player, and then expecting everybody to compete on “equal” terms.
Well, unless you’re going to redefine “capitalism” so that none of the mercantile empires of the 18th and 19th centuries count (and indeed to the point where you can argue that it has never actually existed at all), the entire history of the period is full of examples, such as the famous Irish famine of 1845 – 1852, several of the Indian famines under British colonial rule, the genocide of the Native Americans, the various genocides executed by the British Empire… All of which ultimately come back to this business of a bunch of guys turning up armed to the teeth and deciding that they own a bunch of land, and the agricultural and mineral products of it, and then killing as many people as it takes to make that claim stick.
I see Tom Weiss is back to show his lack of empathy toward his fellow men and women, and to show his abject ignorance and overweening arrogance on the topics of economics, politics, history, and reality.
He’s just another broken record of assholes, dating back to six months before Obama’s first election. They all sound the same, and they all in their arrogance think that we haven’t heard their drivel hundreds of times already, and not one of them had the convincing argument. Which is the historical basis that their idiotology works as they claim. History says otherwise, monopolies, cartels, trusts, the rich get richer and the poor get screwed. Funny how reality has a liberal bias, as it works.
Tom Weiss, even if you are being too dumb too understand, I’m not letting you get away with your hogwash. At least it might be usefull for another reader who might be swayed by your BS.
First let us focus on the government part. On that, we can agree. It is due to government laws that corporations can exist, or that trademark laws or things like copyright exist. Without the government specifically enabling these through laws, these things would not exist. So are you arguing against those laws? Do you think copyrights, trademarks, corporate laws should be scrapped? I highly doubt that. So you are arguing for governments actually giving corporations power.
Secondly, the workers part. You have a very alien concept of voluntarily. A person needs to eat. A person needs shelter. A boss asking their employee to work two extra hours for free ‘or else’ has more power. Yes, the person voluntarily says yes, but saying no means not being able to pay the mortgage at the end of the month. There are a lot of examples of company towns in which the majority of the population work at one plant, and other jobs are scarce.
Thirdly, you omit other sources of power a company might have. Monopolies or monopsonies are real things, but you keep avoiding those issues.
Wrong. Companies will generally pay the bare minimum they can get away with, and sometimes they are forced to pay handsomely because of scarcity.
Your two ‘shoulds’ are value judgements on your part. They are not related to some cosmic or inescapable law. They are directed -wrongly or rightly- by your ideology. Not saying your value judgement is wrong, but at least be aware that this is the case.
Wrong. You owe them more then just money, at a minimum you owe them a safe work environment. Others things you might owe them depend on your ideological viewpoint, your viewpoint is minimalistic, mine is larger. But to state that your viewpoint is the ‘ethical’ one is showing how narrowminded and fixed on your own ideology you are.
Secondly, again, you are unwilling to take into account the power differential between large corporations and individual workers, but I know on this point we will never come to an agreement. I just find it funny that you so strongly belief government is too powerful and individuals are being crushed under their weight, while you don’t see that powerful, sometimes even state-like, entities can also crush individuals under their weight.
Do you remember those clothing factories in Bangladesh? Do you really think they didn’t owe their semi-slave labor anything more than wages? That these companies are not responsible for the deaths of their workers?
So those companies paying slave-wages in third world countries are the ethical ones, governments mandating at least a living wage are the unethical ones. I think we are about done here. Don’t come whining when people calling libertarianism a morally bankrupt ideology and their cheerleaders immoral selfish assholes.
Tom Weiss, #43
Just like any libertarian, you’re incapable of empathy with the non-rich and non-corporations. You don’t honestly believe this shit about magic power equilibrium arising between millionaires’ corporations and the disadvantaged poor, do you?
The welfare of the higher ups of a corporation and their families does not immediately depend on the specifics of the labor at the very bottom. On the other hand, the well-being of the lowest rung employees and their families very urgently and immediately depends on the job they’re currently interviewing for. So your claim that a power equilibrium develops that would serve both sides well is completely clueless rambling. It’s also not shown to be true either. How the fuck are corporations with access to thousands of workers desperate for work in anything close to an equal position as thousands of desperate workers with access to a handful of corporations to work for?
LOL. Leave the poor alone. You mean leave the rich alone to continue to fuck over the poor.
Actually look at your phrasing. Nothing but empty meaningless theoretical bullshit. Give them the tools to look after themselves? Dependent upon the state? What the holy fuck are you talking about? Who said anything about making people dependent?
Dunc, #44
Bingo. I’m sure this point will go ignored though and instead replied to with more vague horseshit by Tom.
@Tom Weiss #43 #44
And you are wondering why people call you and your world view immoral? You are now stating yourself, proudly, that you actually are immoral and you are calling for an morality lacking law system. Which is, btw, contradiction in terms, any law system must conform to and codify morality that given society adheres to. For example when you codify in law this:
You are legislating moral view and you have to justify it as such in some way.
No, they are not. Where did you study history? I know twelve year olds who have better grasp at reality than you.
Most causes for starvation are environmental, out of controll of any society.
Starvation in early Soviet Ukraine and in recent North Korea were/are caused by poorly executed attempts at (authoritarian) communism, I guess these are the only ones known to you.
But starvations in colonial (and to some extent even recent) India were not and are not caused by neither socialism nor communism. They were and are caused by corporations that exploit(ed) the region at the very edge of its limits without consideration or understanding for long-term effects.
Starvations in recent Africa are caused by lack of infrastructure and legislation combined/caused by with unstable politics and unpredictable environment. No communism or socialism there either.
So all in all, from societal point of view, legislations that are based on poor understanding of reality or bad infromational input are causes of starvation – irrespective to which political ideology proponents of those legislations adhere. Rightly done collectivization, partial centralization and pooling of resources actually can help to prevent or mitigate famines.
That is not what you are arguing for. You are either deluding yourself, or outright lying.
What you are writing is so stupid, it is painfull to read. Your black and white view of the world (regulations=bad, no regulations=good) is absurd in the extreme. You seem not to be able to wrap your head around the fact that nobody here is arguing for total centralization and top-down regulation of everything and for making people dependant oupon the state. We are arguing, that some level of regulation is necessary to balance out power imbalances that lead to increasing of powerty and stratification of society. As evidenced by very recent historical events. Tax cuts for wealthy people in US (and to lesser extent in EU) combined among other things with disempowerment of unions have lead to and still lead to reduction of upward social mobility which is much lower in US than in most EU countrise which thankfully, suprise suprise, still have strong and strict employment laws including laws about minimal wage -click-.
Germany recently raised minimal wage significantly. No mass closing of businesses ensued.
Only in your mind. You did not present any evidence for anything.
Okay, let me just try to distill down all the little tiny arguments Tom Weiss has spewed out in this thread, in his typical Gish Gallop of Gibbertarian inanity.
-This volunteer position is no big deal because no one is forced to accept the position. The position is accepted by your own “free will”.
-There is no standard by which to determine the value of people’s time aside from what employer and employee agree upon.
– Willingness to work for X amount means that you are being paid accordingly, no matter how little that amount is.
– There is no coercion involved because there is no Gunz.
– The most moral of all possible transactions are those enterred into freely.
– It is EVIL to have rules, standards, regulations, or restrictions on transactions.
– The employer is in no position to refuse when they are coerced by the Gun of Government regulation.
– All laws are enforced at the barrel of a Gun (though this is a necessary evil)
– Supply and Demand for college professors is at work here and if you don’t like it, it is just a sign to enter another industry.
– The death of Eric Garner would not have happened if not for regulation of untaxed resale of cigarettes.
– The minimum wage is bad because a $15 dollar minimum wage (almost double the national minimum wage) caused bad things in Seattle.
– The phrase “rich white dude” is racist.
– Private property is not an abstraction, because it is obvious that a book belongs to its writer and because the alternative (communism) always led to violence.
-The power imbalance between employees and employers only occurs when there is only one employer because competition in a free market ensures employers will treat their employees right.
– A company cannot force anyone to starve to death because it has no legal force.
– The free market lifts people out of poverty. Cites wikipedia article about Deidre McCloskey where I can find no information regarding this claim.
– It is not possible or even good to “legislate morality”
– The war on poverty has failed.
– It is not initiation of force to stop someone from breaking an agreement, but it is initiation of force to regulate.
– Capitalism is incapable of genocide.
– Capitalism has not caused any mass starvations.
– Labor market pays low amount for jobs anyone can do, high amount for “Director of Operations”, due to supply and demand for their skill sets.
I don’t even know how to refute this. Some of these are Not Even Wrong, a lot are dependent on imagining that we are already operating under Pure Free Market Capitalism right now and then other arguments go on to imagine that the government for the last century or so has been going full force in a quasi-socialist effort to destroy big business and eliminate all economic inequality. You can’t have both! And then there is the sheer historical ignorance, in addition to the ignorance of economics. There’s the gibbertarian talking points and articles of faith. There’s the utterly asinine assertions, like the ones regarding Eric Garner and anti-white racism. And all throughout, there is little to no evidence for anything, yet Tom Weiss insists that he is bringing evidence to the table. I assume Seattle and McCloskey were all the evidence he presumed he would need for all of the myriad little arguments spurted out above.
Every time I see a comment by Tom Weiss, my eyes start twitching and a little part of my soul dies. The arrogance, the stubbornness, the pseudointellectual long-windedness grounded entirely in an ass-backwards perspective on a very selectively chosen set of facts. It is frustrating every single time, and becomes even more frustrating knowing that they will never learn and they will never stop, and will always continue to present themselves as an authority when they are simply spewing out idiocies with intellectually dishonest smarm and unwarranted self-confidence.
Tom Weiss
That’s two different things, of course, and you need a lot of cognitive dissonance to think that giving somebody tools to care for themselves is the same thing as leaving people alone. BUt that’s the neat Libertarian trick: They pretend that those things are actually the same.
Reality on planet earth is, of course, different. In reality on planet earth, one of the things that allows people to take care of themselves as adults is to give them a safe and secure childhood and lots of free quality education with lots and lots of special needs programs. Because the autistic child will not simply stop being autistic if you ignore their neurological diversity.
Another thing that allows people to take care of themselves: strong social net, public healthcare, workers’ rights. If you can go to the doctor, get a sick slip, rest and recover, you can maintain your productivity over a long period of time. If you cannot miss a day of work because you will get fired and cannot take sick leave because you won’t get paid you cannot take care of your health and therefore future earning potential.
Also, in Libertarian-Land everybody seems to be potentially able to earn their living. There don’t seem to exist children (though we have to remember that they have to earn their living in many parts of the world where the horrible government does not make poor people dependent on it), elderly people, disabled people.
A point a lot of people (in general) seem to fail to grasp, and this is an issue particularly affecting libertarians, is that economics (the science) doesn’t make value judgments, just like other sciences (or aught not, sadly, economics is sometimes heavily politicized).
Just like physics can provide a model to calculate the time an object falls from a certain distance in certain circumstances, but doesn’t make a value judgment on the ethics of throwing people from a building, economics can provide models to estimate for example the impact on the economy when for example a minimum wage is imposed, but doesn’t necessarily says of those impact are a bad or good thing.
We know imposing a minimum wage law has impact on the economy (not always negatively!), the only thing the model can (try to) predict are the impact on certain indicators. For example, what’s the impact on the total wealth, what’s the impact on exports, what’s the impact on taxes? It is then up to the policy makers to take a decision, a decision which hopefully takes into account the various impacts on the economy, and also takes into account various other factors, most of which will probably be driven by the ideology of the policy maker. A classical example is the ‘unemployment versus inflation’ policy decisions, traditional left parties will prefer the former, while more right-leaning parties generally prefer the latter.
I mostly blame a very limited knowledge of economics. In my memory, my own education of economics went something like this:
1/ The first couple of months the student learns the basic ‘perfect’ model: unlimited suppliers, unlimited consumers, very basic products, non-interference between markets, perfect knowledge of all actors, the works. In this model, the invisible hand reigns supreme.
2/ The next couple of years are spent basically trying to show that 1 is pure bullshit. OK, maybe I’m a bit too harsh, but basically it is shown why most premises of 1 are either wrong, much more limited, or not very applicable in most circumstances.
A lot of libertarians I encounter seem to have gained some knowledge of 1, either through self study or an economics 101 course, but are not even aware 2 exists. Then they elevate this ‘perfect model’ as an ideal to strive for, the model gains an inherent ‘goodness’ about it. Therefore, any (government) interference with it is seen as ‘bad’. It is specifically this that let me to start seeing libertarianism as a religion.
Problem in Seattle with the minimum wage increase? I don’t this so Tom. Stop believing your propaganda, and look at the facts.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/seatac-proving-trickle-down-economics-wrong
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/07/03/3456393/minimum-wage-state-increase-employment/
Somehow, the liberturds can’t grasp the idea that more money in the economy grows the economy. Poor people spend their raises.
Oh, by the way, the only two scraps of evidence that Tom Weiss could bother to scrounge up?
Seattle: http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/04/10/3645268/new-evidence-buries-lie-about-seattle-minimum-wage/
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/21/seattle-economy-worsening-inequality
http://www.cheatsheet.com/business/no-seattles-15-minimum-wage-hasnt-dragged-the-citys-economy-down.html/?a=viewall
Important details from that last link
Please note that this article and the article Tom cites are both from March of this year.
NPR also confirms that the minimum wage is currently 11 per hour, not 15: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/05/09/405248917/seattle-restaurants-scramble-to-pay-a-higher-minimum-wage
As for McCloskey, here is the list of the hundreds of articles she has published: http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/articles/index.php
Skimming through, I find it hard to find where she conclusively gave evidence supporting Tom’s bold and confident assertion that she “absolutely conclusive” that “Freedom lifts people from poverty – centralization and government control makes people poorer.” If she had done so, the world of economics would have been turned on its head. And yet it doesn’t seem very prominent in her list of works! The evidence for Tom’s claim would be fascinating to see, but I’m fairly sure Tom once again is just distorting reality and doesn’t know what the fuck they are on about.
Oh btw, if anyone passing through mistakenly takes Tom Weiss seriously, please see this thread:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/07/07/so-they-were-little-more-than-script-kiddies-after-all/
In it, he insists:
Right-wing means libertarian.
Fascism is left-wing (Hi Jonah Goldberg!)
Fascists could never be right-wing because right-wingers don’t like no gubmint.
Liberals are authoritarian because of school lunches and anti-discrimination laws.
Gay rights are authoritarian because it violates religious beliefs.
“Discrimination is the essence of freedom”
Governments cause monopolies!
Non-state entities never diminish people’s freedom.
The right is protecting voting rights and liberals are trying to undermine them!
The far left is the only one making a “nanny state for corporations”
Affirmative consent is bad and authoritarian, legislating the bedroom! (This was rightly called out as odious rape apologia, but Tom Weiss managed to worm his way out of too many people taking notice. It’s at comment 77)
And lots of Commie bashing.
Tom Weiss is deserving of little more than ridicule. Maybe a healthy dose of disgust as well.
anteprepro, #55
Wow, I didn’t keep up with that thread and now I’m glad.
Saad: I didn’t keep up with that thread and at one point wanted to come up with a comprehensive rebuttal, but I came back too late and, much like this thread, Tom just opened up the bullshit floodgates to drown the thread with, which makes a complete and thorough refutation of his “points” impossible. Really, I am not sure why I didn’t notice that he is basically doing a Gish Gallop until now.
Well, I think my response has already been covered by others, and at length.
One small addition remains: I didn’t say anything about the different wages drawn by different ‘ranks’ of workers, and quite deliberately so. If the company executive earns more than the fry cook – even many times as much – that’s fine by me. I’m not even all that concerned whether the high salary might be ‘fair’ or ‘reasonable’; if the company wants to pay that much they can go right ahead.
My concern is whether the fry cook, who works the same hours, can live off their wage at all. If they work full time and still have to crane their neck to spot the poverty line in the distance then that’s simply not good enough.
If that much time goes into labour the person has earned the right to a certain living standard. Not luxury, but enough so they can be sure they have food on the table, heat in winter and don’t run the risk of starvation (or bankruptcy) when they get sick or injured.
Throw as much money at your execs as you like. Just leave enough for everyone else.
komarov:
I agree with this.
Here, I think you are too generous. Incredibly irresponsible, massive, disproportionate compensation for the high level executives is the norm and it certainly deserves criticism and should be regulated, as far as I can see, just for different reasons than those saying that the low-level full time employees deserve to make enough money to actually live off of.
The reasons:
1. Executives have consistently been getting higher and higher bonuses, even when the company performance is poor. Which means, regardless of their own success, executives are still getting rewarded as if they were successful, simply because they have a high status job, which is absurd.
2. Money used for executive salaries and bonuses could be used to increase wages for other employees or otherwise reinvest in the company, or at least be used to increase the stock dividends paid out to investors. The relevant concept is opportunity costs: money sent towards executive compensation could be spent elsewhere and though this is company choice, it is not one without broader implications.
3. The unfair overcompensation of executives drives income inequality and all of the other related social ills. Simply ensuring a living wage would not stop the fact that the richest and most elite in the business world are receiving ludicrously more money. And businesses could find a way to cut funds from mid-level employees to ensure a living wage while leaving massive executive compensation intact, continuing the gap between rich and poor and essentially just stalling as a living wage becomes more and more expensive.
4. For whatever reason, be it conflict of interest or a desire to compete with the executive compensation of other companies, companies continue to overinflate executive compensation even if it is clearly to the company’s overall financial detriment.
5. Related to four, this often leads to cutting costs in such a way that most hurt and demand more from the lowest levels of employees.
6. The massive rewards to executives are blatantly unfair in that it is the most ridiculously disproportionate reward for work in our economy and yet the prestige of the position is enough for people like Tom to insinuate that these people actually deserve to make 100 to 1000 times as much as a normal worker.
Even if the non-executives are getting “enough”, there is still problems within the company and in our culture and economy at large where this kind of compensation is just damaging because it is neither fair or reasonable.
(I doubt that we actually disagree on this subject, by the way, I just saw an opening to make a rhetorical point, I suppose!)
@anteprepro 55
I’m struck by the structure and implications of Tom Weiss’s comments as well. He has a very particular view of what sort of social force is good and bad and why. It’s far better to simply accept authoritative social force in neutral terms and move on to what force is appropriate in what context.
In the broadest context in that debate “Government” is everything from parents in a household or a gang-leader all the way up to what we colloquially call “government” and includes religion and corporations. It’s authoritative social force that is the true focus of disagreement. What matters is which applications of force and authority are appropriate and which ones are not.
It just happens that we call the people and structure that organizes a significant* section of society at the highest level “government”. In a democratic republic citizens are the government acting through representatives. We are not always acting through representatives at a public morals and ethics level (and the government leaves a huge number of those things to us) and I do not think that Tom Weiss would suggest that applied social force to change society is bad in a general sense.
Yet they ignore the social force applied by corporations and religion, and had to make social force that spreads ideas and behaviors that empower people to know what consent is and how to recognize and give it as bad thing. It’s just not as simple as they want it to be with government and society blending all over the place.
I looked up the proposed affirmative consent law and compared it with what they described in thier #77 from that thread..
That law has to do with what state government funded educational institutions have to look at when investigating a sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, or stalking claim. The effect on the general public is indirect and only comes into play when there is a complaint. Sure the rest of us are going to be lecturing (preferably merely educating) people like him on what affirmative consent is, but the actions of the public are not legislation.
Anteprepro, yes, I agree completely. I was trying to avoid starting another open-ended subtopic in this thread so I skipped over the side-effects on the other end of the broken payscale. By the looks of it you started it and ended it in one go, arguing much more clearly I ever could have. *bows head*
I am appalled (but not surprised) that our liberturd troll is such an ignoramous of how bad religious institutions and corporations behave.
OK TW, show me with non-religious based evidence that women/blacks/latinos/GLBT aren’t your equal under the constitution and have all constitutionally based protections as you including the right to bodily integrity as is supported by the constitution and international declarations…
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights
Also, the only reason regulatory agencies like the FDA exists is that corporations were amoral killers of people for their profits.
http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/WhatWeDo/History/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Food_and_Drug_Administration
A lot of great work in this thread, but I wanted to highlight this gem from Tom Weiss @33:
So, I assume that in the Tom Weiss world, the internet where social media thrives was a creation of the free market, with no government involvement at all, no sirree bob (did you hear the one about how Al Gore invented the internet, hah hah!?). And of course if you’re too poor to afford internet service and a device to access it, you can always go down to your local private library to access it and check out all that wonderful information on social media (which, of course, is never in any way censored or influenced by large corporations), amirite?
What I never understand about Libertarians is whether they are completely unaware of history AND current social conditions in large parts of the word or whether they simply think that we are.
Because, dudes, we know what happens if you don’t regulate. The 19th century in Europe and the USA happened. People starved because they did not have a choice to “take a better job” because there were none. They did not have the opportunity to improve their skills and market value because they were working 16 hours a day and still didn’t get enough food. They couldn’t turn down a dangerous job because they needed to eat.
And that’s still happening in large parts of the world.
We know what the Libertarian Utopia looks like. We have seen it and we have decided that it’s horrible.
We have seen what happens if you deregulate the financial markets. The people paying the price are not those who caused it.
I also have a question, Tom Weiss:
We’re in an economic crisis. Jobs are short, there’s a high unemployment rate. If you find a job, it pays 30% less than a job you had started in before the crisis. Average time of unemployment is 12 months, many people have been out of work for much longer. If your rent or mortage is a few days late, you can be turned out on the street. No legal protection for workers, your boss can hire and fire at will.
There’s a woman, single mother, who has a job. It’s a pre-crisis job, so she can still make ends meet, even though it is tough. Her boss calls her into his office. He tells her that he has her dismissal on his desk, because a new employee would cost 30% less. Unless she agrees to give him a daily blowjob, she’s fired.
Fair transaction or not?
I thought you were going in a different direction but ok. In a philisophical sense, I suppose it’s interesting to debate whether one can “own” land (How far down? What about the air above?). Does one have to actually control the land in order to “own” it? One can also play the “who was here first” game for as far back into history as possible – ultimately everyone on earth is living on land that was at one point “stolen” from someone at gunpoint.
But I don’t see how this is in any way an argument against libertarianism. If using force to coerce someone is bad – and your construct implicitely assumes that it is – then whatever political system which uses the least amount of force should be good. Except that’s not what you’re arguing. You’re arguing that force should be used to take from the rich. In your argument, the initiation of force is a necessity. In order for the “poor” to get “their share” of what the “greedy rich” have “stolen”, government must forcibly take their property. This, in your worldview, is moral. And even though it is ahistorical and not economically sound, you’re well within your rights to argue for such a system. I’ll continue to try to convince people – including you, btw – that freedom is the better option all around.
This isn’t capitalism. This is authoritarianism, something the left is quite good at.
Here’s my concept of voluntary – of your own free will. What you eat and where you live are up to you. My need for food and shelter may not be the same as your need, so why impose the same standard on both of us? Let me figure out what I need to survive and I’ll let you do the same.
A boss has power, and an employee has power. A boss can ask for 2 free hours of work, and they might get it once or twice, but if it becomes a habit then the employee can ultimately choose to leave for a competitor who doesn’t ask them to work for free. Company towns can generally only exist where a government has given that company a monopoly. Where there is free enterprise, there is competition. Where there is competition, the power of the employee is greater. And where there is competition, monopolies are hard if not impossible to maintain. Where there is government control, monopolies are the natural order of things – just ask Uber.
How is this argument funny? Government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. They have guns and can legitimately use them to coerce people into compliance. Companies CAN NOT do this. And you’re misreading my argument if you think I’m saying companies have no power – of course they have some. But what power they have pales in comparison to the government.
I’m not whining, I’m pointing out the immorality of the progressive ideology. Companies paying what we in the US would consider slave wages are, in your hypothetical, entirely ethical, if those wages are determined by a free market. And a government interfering with the free exchange of goods between two people is not acting morally, and is not acting in a way helpful to either party.
You use words like “living wage” without definition – who decides what a living wage is? Is a cell phone necessary to live on a living wage? Is a car? Air conditioning? A flat screen TV? Cable? HBO? A tablet computer? A desktop computer? You can say I’m being silly and lay out general guidelines for what could generally be considered a “living wage” for most people – but then you must coerce everyone involved. Who then pays for the increased “living wage”? People lose their jobs and consumers are charged more to compensate.
The internet, as it currently manifests itself, is indeed a creation of the free market. In fact if a libertarian were to design it from scratch, I’m not sure how much different it would look. Why? Few if any regulations (until Obama that is). If you’d like to argue that government had a hand in the basic research from which the technology for the internet was based, I won’t argue. If you’d like to argue that government is in any way responsible for the speed, efficiency, interoperability, reach, or impact of the internet since, I would say you’re living in a fantasy world. The government (for once) got out of the way. I shudder to think what would have happened if they hadn’t.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Under a libertarian system – or a conservative system for that matter – all people are equal and have equal protection under the law.
But let’s unpack your “bodily integrity” comment for a moment. Pro-abortion activitists have historically focused on this argument, that a woman has bodily integrity which is inviolable (I agree, btw). But then they stop there – they don’t use that same logic for any other issue. Progressives demand coersion for any number of other issues but for abortion they demand to leave their bodies alone. Interesting, that.
To all – I’ve enjoyed these debates (and in all sincerety I have) but I’ll not be engaging in this thread anymore. I have a long weekend upcoming and plan to enjoy it. I’ll be back later to continue my attempt to convince you that freedom is what we should be striving for, not coersion and authoritarianism.
I’ll answer this one quick. Love the “pre-crisis” characterization, btw, almost everything’s a crisis for progressives.
Why take the third option – keeping her job at a 30% pay cut – off the table? An employer typically would want to keep a worker they know well even if they have to cut costs.
Having said that, if these are the options on the table then whatever she chose would be a fair transaction. Sex workers trade sexual acts for money and this is what she would be doing here. It would also be a fair transaction were the sexes reversed, or if the sexes were the same.
Tom Weiss
1. Well, my scenario, my rules.
2. Maybe because he wants blowjobs?
3. It’s already been made clear that she couldn’t support her family at 30% less.
Thank you for saying out loud that you are in favour of rape. You are, in fact, pro rape. Because forcing somebody to have sex with you because you are in a position of power over them is rape. But in your world, it’s OK. The team coach who demands that the football plaers let him fuck them so they can stay on the team? Fair transaction! Fuck me or starve? Fair transaction! Suck me off or I’ll take away your children? Fair transaction!
Don’t you dare and bring sex-workers into this, because they know better than you that what I described is NOT what their job is.
That wouldn’t be a fair transaction regardless of the gender of the victim. That’s someone in a position of power using their position to coerce someone else into performing a sexual act. In other words, that’s rape. Will your utterly repugnant fuckwittery never end?
@Tom Weiss #65/66
I see you conveniently did not answer to any of the posts that called you out on your demonstrable errors. And for those you answered to, you ignored the context of the debate and things that were said prior to this and repeat again the same nonsense that was already refuted.
You still provided no evidence for your assertions. You completely avoided multiple posts that pointed out – with historical examples – that you are arguing out of your ass when you said that starvation is caused by socialism. You failed to adress the evidenced argument pointing out, that before market regulations in place unsafe or non-functioning drugs were sold en masse to people. You ignore examples showing that currently unregulated markets in other countries do not work as you assert free market would work. You contradict yourself multiple times in this thread, sometimes saying that legislature should not enforce morals at all and on other time saying that libertarian system is more moral than any alternative and that is the reason why it should be preferred. You do not understand what coercion is, and you essentially say that black-mail and coercion are OK in all but one case – unless guns are involved. Blackmail in your opinion is OK, but governmental regulation is not.
I do not say this often, but you are an asshole of epic proportions. You are despicable and immoral. I am not the owner of this blog, but in my opinion your 66 is ban worthy, because you are not advocating sex workers rights (which most of people on FtB are for), but you are engaging in apologetics for statutory rape.
I personally am not wasting my time on your asinine ramblings anymore because debate with you leads to nowhere, you present no new information, no arguments for me to learn from and you yourself evidently refuse to learn.
Somebody with direct line to PZ, please let him know so he can evaluate if banhammer should be applied.
Quick fix:
I’m astonished that this just does not sink in. People need food. So the rest of Tom’s argument falls apart on that basis alone. Which makes the situation in Giliell’s example out into something particularly dreadful. I think I’ll put it next to the acclaimed “Problem in a nutshell” and call it “Freedom of Choice”.*
And no, there is no competition for workers. Unless you are the world’s foremost expert in a given field you simply cannot walk away from a job secure in the knowledge that someone else will give you a new one, much less under better conditions.
*I’ll pay for the artwork with two pennies, a torn piece of paper and a chewing gum I stepped on earlier. If Giliell accepts it’s an entirely fair transaction, regardless of any external factors (e.g. upcoming rent, a desparate craving for gum, …).
@ komarov
I’d missed that completely. I was distracted by his rape apologia. ? His stupidity has actually become rage-inducing at this point.
I did have a fairly lengthy reply typed up, but lost it because my login had expired…
To summarize, apart from the obvious nonsense like the suggestion that people can simply choose not to eat, or that company towns only exist because of government-granted monopolies, the main point I wanted to make is that Tom’s argument rests on two false premises: that the supply of vacant jobs is always sufficiently large that dissatisfied workers can always find alternative employment under better conditions, and that the movement of labour is both unlimited and entirely frictionless. I’m pretty sure that mismatches between supply / demand and friction costs are at least mentioned even in 101 level economics courses.
One other point:
This does not necessarily follow, because “amount of force used” is not the only metric by which we can make moral judgements. Accepting that all political systems rely on some measure of force, we need to consider trade-offs between various primary goods. Minimising the use of force is clearly one primary good, but it is not the only primary good. We can also consider outcomes. For example, if we can consider principles such as fair equality of opportunity, the difference principle, or the just savings principle, when evaluating different trade-offs between perfect liberty and justice.
It’s a symptom of overly-simplistic, black-and-white thinking to assert that there is only one metric that counts when dealing with such complex matters.
To clarify, I added that “if” myself because that’s what it boils down in many cases. This was what I meant by the the ‘quick fix’ (Similar to the “Fixed that for you” other’s have been using). I should have made it more clear that this was my addition. Sorry.
It’s not rape at all, but thanks for trying to smear me like that. The employer, in your hypothetical, was not forcing his employee to give him a blow job. He was offering it in trade for a job. For all intents and purposes he had fired her already – as the conditions for employment had changed significantly. That is sex work, and if she chose to accept the position that is what she would be.
He did not have, in your hypothetical, the barrel of a gun pointed at her. Or a knife. He did not, in your hypothetical, coerce her at all. He offered her a choice. He did so openly. He would, presumably, put that stipulation in writing and attest to the job conditions to other employees or the press. And in your hypothetical, presumably, that offer wouldn’t be against any laws (as it would be in most places now).
If he had someone willing to do the job for 30% less than he would have been justified in simply firing her without offering her first right of refusal under the new terms. Would that be a more humane fate for a single mother? But in your hypothetical he offered her a job, instead of letting her go, that included sex work as a component of it. She is free to decline and find other employment – as she would have to do were he to simply fire her outright.
Tell me again how this is rape? He is not in a position of power over her, he is offering her a job. He is not forcing her because she is free to decline. The only arbiter of whether or not it would be a fair transaction would be the woman involved – not you or anyone else.
Tom Weiss, #74
You are either a fucking idiot or a callous piece of shit.
For the nth time, the dynamic between the working poor and corporations and bosses is not a fair balance to begin with. It’s never a fair and balanced “power equilibrium” as you claim and never can be (even with regulations it’s not). Corporations and the bosses’ personal lives and welfare are never in immediate jeopardy because of their dealings with their bottom tier employees. The struggling employees on the other hand are always at risk of having them and their families very well-being snatched away from them at the employers’ whim in your bullshit ideal rich man’s world.
How are you not getting this? Is this a standard libertarian deficiency or are you purposely being an asshole?
So you agree? Who the fuck cares about your uneducated opinion? Religion drools, science rules, you have a religion of liberturdism, You droool.
Wrong asshole. COERCION. That makes it rape. Guns and knifes aren’t required, except by idjits like you. It isn’t full willing consent. More drooling by the idiot with their irrational idiotology.
Tom Weiss, #74
Yes, a choice between the job and not being able to pay rent and and for her children’s food. Yup, it’s a free choice. No coercion at all.
Holy fuck, he’s against abortion too. Of course.
Charly –
I have a little bit of time and you’re right that I didn’t address some of these arguments, because I don’t think there’s much to argue about. Authoritarianism, communism, socialism, have repeatedly and consistenly proven to destroy economies and empoverish their citizens. Venezuela and Greece are just two present-day examples (want to keep going down the list? Cuba, North Korea, etc. Shall we go back through the history of the 20th century?). The arguments a progressive can make include: they went too far, we need to strike a balance, there were local considerations, etc. as to why centralized control always fails, but there’s really no argument that the freer a society is the more prosperous they are. Progressives talk alot about the right being “anti-science” but yet they want to ignore the evidence on this. Take a glance at the work Diedre McCloskey has done – it is definitive in my view.
No linked evidence by the liberturd. Typical. They are nothing but illogical slogans and arrogant amoral opinions. Not one bit of reality to be seen. Which is why they are laughed at. *Points at liberturdI* Bwahahahahahahaha
Tom Weiss thinks fair transactions is deliberately and unnecessarily putting someone’s personal and family welfare at jeopardy while keeping yours firmly secure with an objectively excessive seven-figure salary.
Lawl.
No wonder Libertarianism is a fucking joke.
Do corporations need employees? Yes.
Can a boss do all of the work by themselves? No.
If each of these answers are true then an employee has power. That power is greater if the employee has a specialized skill, and less if they have no skills. And if there is a free labor market then the employee can, if they choose to leave their current position, find other work relatively quickly (inversely proportional to the level of their skill, in all likelyhood).
Corporations want to recruit value and they generally want to create teams that are happy and work productively. How are you not getting that the labor market is not something out of a Dickens novel?
I am pro-choice. I think I’ve made that clear several times.
Bingo. And if you had chosen not to ignore the very key terms “working poor” and “struggling employees” you would have stopped there and not written this bullshit:
No, people who are born into disadvantaged conditions (thanks to the legacy of rich people who think like you) cannot just “choose” to leave their current position and find work quickly. That’s the whole point.
Like I said before, you are regurgitating naive unrealistic theoretical stuff. It doesn’t apply to the real world. Look the fuck around you in the real world of how many people struggle to live on minimum wage and the devastating toll it takes on their families and next generations.
These are EXACTLY the people libertarianism and free markets help the most. How are you not seeing this? People can be born into disadvantaged conditions but their only way out of those conditions is through freedom and equality of opportunity, not outcomes. Government control, government programs, government coersion, only perpetuates their disadvantage and keeps them among the “working poor.”
Nope, you haven’t. You are an incoherent writer who can’t back up anything with evidence. Your word is only takes lies and bullshit without links to evidence, evidence that does back up your claims, which hasn’t been the case so far. You can’t be believed. Nor is your declaration of being pro-choice. Your rhetoric belies that claim.
How are you not getting that (a) there really are things called “structural unemployment”, “frictional unemployment”, and “cyclical unemployment”, (b) the labour market is highly variable with respect to geography, and (c) people are not infinitely and perfectly freely mobile?
Unevidenced claims, dismissed without links to academic evidence showing you are correct. Real evidence, not imagufactured bullshit from liberturd propaganda.
Me, #84
Tom Weiss, #85
Hahaha. I think at this point pointing and laughing is the kindest method of interaction with you.
And with these latest droppings by Tom Weiss I’m definitely out. Either he is incredibly naive, or he feigns naivety to mask his utter disregard of other human beings. I guess the latter because he is also incredibly dishonest when answering his critics: he conveniently leaves out the parts he has no answer to, and the rest he answers by misrepresenting their point of view entirely.
Some point Weiss is totally ignorant about:
– power differentials;
– monopolies and monopsonies;
– basic economics;
– consent;
– the real world;
– authoritarianism;
– political sciences;
– freedom & liberty.
Yes Tom, a boss asking their desperate just-fired employee to give him a blowjob for their job back IS INDEED RAPE.
Again, the only thing you prove here again is that libertarianism is indeed an immoral religion, not based on any notion of empathy, facts, or logic.
Tom Weiss
It’s rape by the common definition found in the laws of almost all western nations.
She has no possibility to say “no”, unless she wants to lose her home and end up in a homeless shelter with her children. He has the power over her future and he is using it for his personal gratification.
Wait, Greece? Greece is capitalist as fuck. If you mean Tsipras, Varoufakis and Siriza, are you aware that they have only been in power for 6 months?
And let’s talk about Cuba. Infant mortality that is lower than the USA. Near 100% alfabetisation. They just eradicated HIV transmission from mother to baby. Have you ever compared that to, say, the Dom Rep?
BTW, sex work is when you offer your service and somebody else accepts that offer. You demanding sexual gratification from somebody who didn’t offer it is sexual harassment at best, rape at worst.
@ Tom Weiss #74
It is rape, you fuckwitted shitnozzle, and it is therefore not an attempt to smear you but a plain fact, because you did in fact just sit there and announce that rape was OK. I even explained in #68 exactly why it’s rape. Jesus, it’s like every time your fingers touch the keyboard you drop an IQ point.
HIV and syphilis. And this despite 55 years of economic embargo from their largest adjacent potential export market and their supposedly inferior communist government.
So leaving someone to starve in the street is A-OK, but taking someone’s bread to feed your family (or, indeed, being expected to contribute a portion of your income in order to provide bread to people who are starving) is UNACCEPTABLE USE OF FORCE.
I can’t help but notice Tom’s ethics are biased in favour of bread-havers.
Tom Weiss,
What the fuck, man?! How can anybody be this dense? Do you understand that people need food in order not to die? Do you understand that people need money in order to buy food? Do you understand that in order to get money to buy food, people generally need a job? Do you understand that there isn’t an infinite number of jobs around? That there isn’t an infinite number of employers around for workers to choose from?
Now, take another look at Giliel’s scenario:
Now, realistically, what are her options? She can’t just say no and leave. Well, she can but if she does, she needs to find another job, and jobs are scarce and she’s got a child to feed. She can’t just accept a lower pay either, really, because she’s struggling to survive as it is? How can you say there’s no coercion in this scenario? If this isn’t coercion, than neither is a robber putting a gun to you’re head. After all, you’ve got the choice not to give him your phone and your wallet, right?
Now, suppose she does decide to leave. Now she’s out there, in desperate need of a source of income in a world with only a limited number of jobs and employers available to her. Now, tell me exactly how your magical free market will help her?
‘Your head’, not ‘you’re head’. Oops.
Good fucking lord. According to Tom Weiss, it is EVIL to infringe upon people’s “free” transactions. It is EVIL to regulate, because that is coercion and initiation of force and so on. What isn’t evil? Telling people that they won’t get a job or will get fired unless they have sex with the person with hiring and firing authority. Coercing people into having sex? Perfectly fine to Tom Weiss. Because free market.
Go fuck yourself, you fucking scumbag. You reach new depths of stupidity, amorality, and outright maliciousness with every fucking post.
The parallel Earth governed by a truly free free market must be a marvel to behold. Of course it is also littlered with the corpses of the poor.* Oh no, that’s wrong. Not the ‘poor’, but those who were unwilling to take advantage of all the opportunities given to them. Due to personal whim, no doubt or, a misplaced sense of personal dignity.
This kind of scenario can, it seems, be re-written indefinetly without ever violating any ethical boundaries – in Tom Weiss’ eyes – unless actual factual violence was being threatened. You are strapped for cash …
– … and need an appendectomy. The doctor will do the surgery but they’ll also take kidney for their trouble. Feel free to find another surgeon if you can still move. Free market.
– … during a particularly cold winter. You can’t afford to pay the utility bills but the company will be happy to give you a generous rebate. Just drop by every day, say from six in the morning to midnight, and do some odd jobs around the office. Little things like making coffee, getting lunch for everybody, scraping the asbestos out of the walls. Feel free to go elsewhere – if there is an ‘elsewhere’ – but they’ll be even less understanding of the terminally cashless. Free market.
– … and need a job quickly to make the rent. No problem. I have an opening and you’re just as qualified as anybody. And because I sympathize with your situation so you can start right away at half the normal salary. Or you can start in six months with a full salary and I’ll get an intern in the meantime. Oh, by the way, applying, interviewing etc. at another company will probably take months. But do feel free to try your luck elsewhere, and if you do I’ll just shred your file right now. Free market.
All fine, no guns or knives at all. Except the surgeon, but that’s a job requirement. As for his requirement for these transactions to be legal, that won’t be a problem once we rid ourselves of the excessive legislation and oversight forced on us by governments.
We ought to popularise “Free Marketeers” as a synonym for extortionists. It encompasses a certain longing for how the world should work according to libertarians and it sounds a bit like ‘Privateers’. Everybody loves pirates, right? At least while they don’t actually happen to you…
*Creating additional opportunities for those willing and able to find the most economic ways of disposing said corpses. E.g. in a stew to save on foodstuffs.
komarov, Free Marketeers as extortionists fits brilliantly.
—————————————————————————————————————-
I am fascinated at Tom Weiss implying that it isn’t “coercion” unless explicit violence is threatened. Libertarians have such a vague and generalized idea of force and violence…..until forcing or coercing someone to have sex is involved, apparently. Then everything is just fine! It is almost like all the neat sounding libertarian principles are just post hoc rationalizations to ensure that things that they want to be true (supremacy of business, minimal taxes, divide between rich and poor, continued “freedom to discriminate”, and so on) are “justified”. It is just interesting how those nice little “principles” seem to start swaying and becoming fuzzy for Tom Weiss when he is given the opportunity to put sexual harassment/sexual exploitation on the table. It is intriguing. And disgusting. And yet all too typical.
I love having the freedom to die in the streets bc corporations don’t give a shit about paying employees a living wage.
God I hate amoral, apathetic libertarians.
Tom Weiss @65:
Except that under your proposed system, LGBT people like myself would have no government enforced workplace protections prohibiting discrimination. Women would have no protections to keep bosses from sexually harassing them. Corporations wouldn’t have to accommodate people with physical disabilities either. Discrimination against these groups was only minimized by the government getting involved. You’d remove the government from the equation, which would likely result in companies screwing people over again.
It’s like you live in an alternate reality with some wildly different history than we have in the real world. In your world, you seem to think corporations would have any incentive to act in the best interests of employees, when history tells us exactly the opposite.
Tony, it seems obvious that this particular proponent of libertarian sociopathy miswrote. This is more in line with the other nonsense he spouted here:
Under a libertarian system – or a conservative system for that matter – all people are equal on paper only and disadvantaged have no protection under the law that would make people equal in reality.
Tony
Well, you can still simply with your own free will choose not to be gay. Or at least not publicly so. As long as it isn’t the ebil gubirnment that does so, it is totally ok if you cannot find, employment, housing, or even support from a private charity because you’re gay. You can always sell your ass to all those totally not gay guys who have wealth and power. Also, sexual harassment doesn’t exist anymore. Unless yourem ployerhold s a gunto your head, him grabbing your ass is just a change in your terms of employment and you can take it or leave it.
Disabled people will profit the most. No more token employment to fulfill quota. No more nanny government demanding that buildings be accessible by wheelchair and having lifts and such, treating wheelchair users like babies who cannot walk the stairs. Nono, such a libertarian utopia would finally free disabled people from being dependent. Now they would have to work really hard themselves and overcome those obstacles. They will be so proud when they finally make it!
+++
Snark aside, I’m really wondering how fucking ignorant folks like Tom Weiss are of economics. I mean, even if I leave those pesky humanitarian concerns aside, a developed society cannot work like that. If college professors earn what is in fact a negative salary, because anybody taking up that position would need additional funds to sustain themselves, you’re ending up without college professors. Sure, Tom Weiss would argue that then the price would go up, only that anybody who ever worked in academia knows that it’s a fast moving field and that if you drop out for a couple of years because the price was too low, you’re no longer really qualified to teach beyond 101.
Future generations would be discouraged to pursue academic careers. We already have the problem that very qualified people are leaving their fields in favour of steady jobs. We run out of academics.
And of course nobody would be able to consume all the goods we now produce dead cheap. Sweat shops in Bangladesh only work because people in Europe and the USA can buy the goods. They’re not producing for the local market. And that’S low price goods like t-shirts. Who’s going to buy a car? If the folks who make cars cannot afford one, you’Re in trouble. Houses? Oh right, rich folks can rent them out! Only that people cannot pay the rent. Damn. In short, we’d be getting the same damn over-production crisis we had all through the 19th century, which must have been a libertarian’s wet dream. They simply ignore that the very things the ebil gubirnment didan d the ebil trade unions forced are the very things that allowed for economic development in the long run.
To make things nice and simple, no economics know-how required, this is the real world:
1. Everyone has biological needs that, if not satisfied, will be detrimental to their health and eventually (though rather quickly) kill them.
2. In addition, there is a need for shelter of some kind because lacking shelter is also very dangerous and detrimental to health.
3. In our society, you need money to satisfy the needs of 1 and 2.
4. In our society, unless you are wealthy, you need to have a job in order to get money (*or you need to receive some kind of public assistance, but this is the kind of thing libertarians oppose the government doing)
5. There are ALWAYS less jobs out there than there are people (there are roughly half, or even a third, as many full-time jobs as there are people)
6. In addition, underemployment is also common (people with degrees taking jobs that don’t require that degree, or people capable and desiring full-time work settling for part-time work).
7. In this situation, where jobs are NOT ubiquitous and where money is needed to live, offering someone a job with terrible pay or with strange conditions attached is predatory and it is coercive.
Some reading related to points 5 and 6:
http://money.usnews.com/money/careers/articles/2011/09/28/15-stunning-statistics-about-the-jobs-market
http://www.statista.com/statistics/192361/unadjusted-monthly-number-of-full-time-employees-in-the-us/
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-10-30/job-stats-fail-to-uncover-underemployed-college-grads
So for any lurkers wondering why we are both laughing at and disgusted by Tom Weiss, that should give you a very basic idea of the biggest thing that they get wrong.
As one of the lurkers out here, thank you for doing the work but I don’t know why you bother. I have long ago given up on arguing with people with perfect systems. Any system is perfect if you can just look away from the mountains of evidence against creationism/libertarianism/Scientology/whatever colospective universe the true believer inhabits.
We do it for you. So you realize that liberturds are nothing but selfish sloganeering ignorant assholes. And the liberturds need to realize that free thought doesn’t mean free from thought, or any idea goes without criticism, but rather free thought is a discipline requiring the one thing they lack. Empirical evidence. So, no sale.
Looking back at this thread, the worst thing isn’t Tom’s attitude towards workers, but his idea that threatening someone into a sexual encounter with you constitutes sex work.
*shudders*
Antepro wants to bring this thread up in a different one, so I figured I’d finish the conversation here.
pentatomid
“Well, she can…” Thank you for making my point.
In the hypothetical situation – the woman in question is already fired. I made this point at least once above. Her employer has found someone else to take the job at a 30% discount, and in the hypothetical situation she doesn’t even have the option of accepting the job for 30% less. He has already fired her, but she didn’t know it, and he is now offering her a job which includes a component of sex work (presuming in this hypothetical situation it’s not illegal, etc.).
She is faced with a free choice – accept the job he is offering or find other employment. If there is any sense of coercion it is of her own creation. I’m sure she doesn’t relish the thought of looking for work in a bad job market, and it is assumed that she wouldn’t relish the idea of performing sex work for money (although some people are quite happy with it). He is in no way coercing her, he is offering her a choice (instead of just firing her, btw, which another boss would have done).
As long as she has a free choice it is not, and cannot be, rape. The robber in your scenario says “give me your money or I [the operative word] will pull this trigger”. That is coercion. The boss in the original scenario is saying “if you agree to sex work, I will employ you.” She is free to refuse and she loses nothing. Her boss is not pointing a gun at her, literally or figuratively. He has already changed the terms of her employment contract and is giving her the option to accept or not.
Note what you’re all trying to argue, btw. You’re arguing against the free association of two people. You’re arguing that these two should not be allowed to enter into a contract like this of their own free will. You’re arguing that the woman in this scenario (and I’m assuming it was a deliberate choice to make her a woman) is not equal and deserves some sort of special protection, that she cannot be trusted to think for herself and make her own choices – because there might be some nebulous “economic coercion” going on somewhere. You are arguing that she is inferior.
She is not inferior as a person, but she has disproportionally inferior strenght to choose really freely in that scenario, because, unlike for her employer, because some of the choices presented to her mean death or at least serious discomfort to her, whereas her employer has none of that risk. It has been explained to you so many times, and so clearly, that I do not believe for one second that you do not understand it. You are just an asocial asshole.
Fuck off allready, you dishonest rape apologist. You make me sick, you putrid piece of scum.
We don’t need to refute your sorry ass. You do a great job of showing why you are a stupid, arrogant, ignorant and amoral asshole on your own. You damage your idiotology with your attitudes more than anything we present otherwise. You are your own worst enemy as far as showing the moral bankruptcy of liberturdism. Your best policy would be to shut the fuck up. But you are too stupid to do so. Thank you for showing us why we should dismiss your claims.
Luckily, in most civilized societies, Tom Weiss latests fantasy scenario will land the boss in welfare and the woman with a huge harassment settlement.
Thank you for giving our point such a wide berth. That would be a really useful skill if you were captaining a ship in the arctic.
In the meantime let me just point out again that this is not a textbook physics problem set in a frictionless vacuum. This is a problem faced by human beings so we can’t just wave away all external factors and assume ‘ideal conditions’. Choices are limited not just by what you would like to do but also what you can do without risking, oh, let’s say death and starvation for example. Like most fundamental constants those two just keep popping up.
You’re arguing that the woman in this scenario (and I’m assuming it was a deliberate choice to make her a woman) is not equal and deserves some sort of special protection, that she cannot be trusted to think for herself and make her own choices – because there might be some nebulous “economic coercion” going on somewhere. You are arguing that she is inferior.
So whenever I try to help someone, or advocate a policy that could help someone, that’s automatically “arguing that he/she is inferior?” That’s about the most blatant example of victim-blaming and bully-apologetics I’ve heard in a long time. Weiss isn’t even smart enough to dress up his support for bullying in more credible rhetoric than that.
If I step up to fend off someone who is trying to rob my mom, is that “arguing that she is inferior?” If I ask the local cops to help me do the same thing, is that “arguing that she is inferior?” Your disgusting attempts to rationalize your indifference are as transparent as they are unoriginal. We’ve heard all of your bullshit talking-points before, and we’ve all had plenty of time to see through them.
I like how bigotry goes hand in hand.
Tom Weiss the white libertarian is also a proponent and defender of rape and sex crimes.
Fucking libertarian white dudes.
Tom Weiss, you slimy sleazy shitheap, I do not believe for one fucking second that you genuinely do not see what is coercive about telling someone they are fired unless they have sex with someone. And you say that we think women are inferior for opposing coercion….the same way you oppose coercion, though apparently only if it is government regulating businesses. You fucking dishonest amoral pile of smouldering cow dung. You are fucking horrid. And you are not smart enough to play the shitty little game you are trying to play. Fuck off. Go get banned, you fucking pathetic excuse for a human being.
The political economy of Tom Weiss would work hell of a lot better if we were fish, e.g. crucian carps or such and even then it would be problematic. Of course there is an absolute minimum of what our time is worth. You need 5 MJ of food energy to sustain the basic processes of your body, easily another 5 MJ to do even light work. Then there has to be some fucking shelter and clothes.
If you are in a much weaker position to negotiate your wages than your employer, the result will not maximise the utility for both parties. This is why we need minimum wages or unions or both. The employers are usually corporations, “robots” with huge powers of negotiation.
And I see that anteprepro made my points without going to fishy analogies. Sorry for the repetition.
Ice Swimmer: Personally, I am a big fan of the idea that, in order to teach, in order to say something in a way that is clear and resonates with people, we need to sometimes say what has already been said, but in a different way. In these debates with Tom Weiss across threads, many people have said essentially the same points, but approached in different ways, using different lines of reasoning, different evidence, different wordings, different analogies, and so forth. Tom Weiss kind of just repeats himself, and is a bad example of repetition, but you can see that while many people make the same broader counterpoints, they do so in a fashion that is somewhat unique. A distinct approach, distinct phrasing and thought processes. And I think that is key for those who might be reading and trying to learn. And it also leaves Tom Weiss with no plausible deniability, because he cannot claim that no-one tried to explain something in a way that fits his method of understanding. If several people have tried to say the same thing in several distinct ways, most people would have something click. If they were being honest and actually cared and were putting even the smallest effort into trying to understand. Which paints a pretty bad picture of Tom Weiss, doesn’t it?
All that blather to say: As long as you are putting your own spin on it, repetition isn’t a big deal (And I liked the way that you approached the concept, anyway, and think it is distinct enough from whatever I said)