ravells: Don't follow you there miko. Can you explain why laws requiring a company to provide a safe system of work for its employees is agressive or coercive?
I have my property - equipment and money, and a guy has his property - his body and labor. We should be free to exchange that property/service as long as we do not cheat each other.
By preventing us from engaging in a voluntary private exchange by the threat of violence the government agresses against us.
By precluding us from freely disposing of our property, the government effectively confiscates the property from us.
I may not be able to provide conditions that are satisfactory to you but I can provide conditions satisfactory to that guy - in exchange for whatever compensation he deems sufficient. Forbidding him to accept my offer you do not improve his conditions but rather force him to fall back to less satisfactory option.
If you believe I would cheat him, why don't you just advise him and make him aware rather than forbid him outright from taking that job?
Sure - union peope who already have a job do not want competition from newcomers. And since a company afflicted with unions would go bancrupt in competition, the necessary condition for unions is to promote monopoly in their industry. So the unions and the capitalists join in lobbying the government for monopoly that excludes the most desperate job-seekers from the market and drives prices up for the consumers.
And so did legislation preventing the exploitation of employees.
That is just not true. It helped people already in better conditions at the expense of those in desperate conditions who lost a chance to improve them and sufefred out of sight.
Wages naturally raise as productiviry increases witha ccumulation of capital. The capitalists competed for labor by offering better conditions in order to attract workers - just like they bid for any scarce resource.
It was lack of capitalism, not the capitalism, that caused people live in squalor.
Most people in capitalist countries are paid much more than minimum wages and work in much better conditions than the laws require.
That kind of blows the whole logic of your (actually Marx's) theory that only regulations maintain the wage level above subsistance.
Virtually every nation on earth today has labour laws and most have employment courts.
Also persistent unemployment that was unheard of in capitalist societies of 19th century.
I am saying that a state should, by legislation, provide minimum standards of treatment in the employment relationship - as is presently the case in every western democracy today.
The "third way" between free market and capitalism does not work. Such legislation, driven by special inetrests, causes unemployment, slows growth and causes more harm than good. Every western democracy today is in moral, political, economic and demographic decay exactly proportional to the degree of affliction by socialist policies.
Sadly it is the case that many people at the bottom of the social ladder have not had any education and do need to be protected from exploitation.
Exploitation is coercion. So far there is only a state that does all the coercion. If a person decides what's good for him/her even after hearing your advice, who are you to force him otherwise?
As I keep saying, having a free market economy and protecting basic human rights are not mutually exclusive.
The only human right that really exists is being able to dispose of one's own body and property without agressing against others. You take that right away. When you deny a person a choice you force him into a worse option, period.
All of you consistently miss this point and think that I advocating some sort of communism.
...many people at the bottom of the social ladder have not had any education and do need to be protected from exploitation. Watch Ja erry Springer show to find out more about what I mean.
I know perfectly what you mean. What you are advocating is fascism - separating people into an elite who is entitled to make decision and mindless masses who are not entitled to make decisions for themsleves. Basically the same as communism or nazism but with a slight ideoligical twist. Not sying you do that intentionally, but newertheless...
Would you care to read a book that started many people on the road to knowlege? "The Road To Serfdom" by F. A. Hayek explains very well how the road ty Tyrany is paved with good intentions.
miko
