[ccffpphh]

The issue is that nobody is entitled to anything. You aren't de facto entitled to receiving money for any services you may or may not provide, regardless of whether you're skilled or not, just because you exist. A company exists because one or more people risked wealth in order to create a net positive system - their existence is not as riskless as one would believe.

[p49k]

Companies aren't inherently "entitled to" anything either, including "personhood," avoidance of personal liability of shareholders for company actions, patents and trademark protection for inventions, rights to use public infrastructure, etc. You can't pretend like society hasn't granted corporations their own reasonable entitlements while arguing that workers shouldn't have their own.

[ccffpphh]

That's true. Companies are just collections of people. They are not entitled to anything either. I don't think they should have any entitlements. No entitlement is "reasonable" if none are owed to anyone or anything to begin with.

[RockIslandLine]

"Companies are just collections of people."

False. Corporations are golems, not people at all.

[abdullahkhalids]

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 3

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person.

Article 22

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

Article 23

1. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. 2. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. 3. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. 4. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

------------

You can either give people unemployment (wage without work)[as per 22 or 23(3)] by taxing the companies you mention, or you can make the companies to give money directly to the people in return for work. There is no third way. You can't deprive people of a dignified life by ignoring them.

[DINKDINK]

Positive and Negative Rights or Coercion and Non-Coercion Rights

"Negative and positive rights are rights that oblige either inaction (negative rights) or action (positive rights). These obligations may be of either a legal or moral character. The notion of positive and negative rights may also be applied to liberty rights." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights

Rights are either (1) liberties that are stipulated to not be infringed by the government (Saying "Dear Leader is a bad leader" is protected speech and taxes/government cannot be used to prosecute someone for saying it) or (2) The ability to demand services to be rendered by the government so one's desires are fulfilled (I demand the ability to take from you via taxes to pay police so that I can have protective forces / police to defend me saying "Dear Leader is a bad leader")

Organizing political unions around negative rights (1) is socially scalable and recursible: "who among us agrees we will never kill our fellow man? of those in the subset, who will agree to never assault someone unless if and only if the person who is to be assaulted, has already assaulted someone" (2) is not socially scalable "Who agrees we should coerce person/group x if some of you feel person/group y wants what person/group x has"

If you think it's possible to write laws the subsidize the well-being of the destitute, Please let me know who I should sue for landing on a desert island and starving to death. Reality isn't fortunate nor charitable -- consensual, opt-in unions can be.

[javert]

> Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Well, I declare differently. Words are wind (unless backed up by an argument).

> You can't deprive people of a dignified life by ignoring them.

Ignoring someone is not depriving them of anything.

Sacrificing some people for the sake of other people--what you are advocating--deprives both groups of a dignified life.

Human sacrifice is utterly barbaric and would be outlawed in a truly civilized society.

[dependenttypes]

The UDHR is a joke. It considers it your human right for someone to kidnap you and (re)educate you. In addition it considers marriage a human right.

> There is no third way

You can give them a piece of fertile land.

[ccffpphh]

Anyone can make any arbitrary decision and call it a human right, it does not make it so. Watch:

----

Article 6753 Everyone has the right to play video games 24 hours a day.

----

Nobody is entitled to life, nor dignity. Simply because someone else exists on the planet doesn't mean their livelihood is now my burden. Me existing doesn't mean you ought to be enslaved to provide for me.

[ckocagil]

If no one is entitled to anything why did humankind abolish slavery? Child workers? Indentured servitude?

Think about it. Indentured servitude is nothing but a contract between two people. By your ideology it should be of no one else's concern. Yet, it is considered slavery and is illegal. Why?

Because it turns out life isn't as simple as "you're not entitled to anything". This same sentence has been uttered by people throughout the ages who profited by the status quo until the commoners got their heads, literally or figuratively.

Every law we have, including the ones that allow you to have private property, private land and virtual property such as copyrights and patents are man-made and arbitrary.

[ccffpphh]

Yes, the one thing we can all agree on is the right to self. Nobody other than themselves can control their body - by that I mean that no matter what you do, nobody can tell you what to think. You can be brainwashed by force, or conditioned to react a certain way to escape force, but you can never really know what another person thinks.

Regardless, one has a right to their body. It is their property. More explicitly, any individual intelligent agent that exists takes up some physical space and that space they occupy at any point in time to continue their existence is theirs only. Property can be given up voluntarily or if nobody else has a claim to it - in this case it extends that clearly rape is wrong, but prostitution is okay, as it's voluntary on both sides. Seizing someone's house is wrong, but exploring space and building new structures in the middle of nowhere is not.

Whether laws exist regarding private property (or the lack thereof), we can define a set of natural rights that any person has regardless of any local, regional, or global laws, constructs, or ideologies. We can all agree murder is wrong, rape is wrong, stealing is wrong, slavery is wrong, and the clearest and most concise way of setting this forward is by understanding that nobody is entitled to anything other than their body and any property they have gained which was either unclaimed or voluntarily from another agent.

Certain schools of thought disagree on unclaimed property, e.g. if one settles a piece of land and the landowner doesn't notice, but after a decade or so has passed and the resident has worked the land and only then the landowner notices, who really owns it? I am not in a position to answer this but I don't think it's "arbitrary" or "man-made" to expect natural rights over your body and property. Everything else, indeed, is abstract.

[ckocagil]

>Regardless, one has a right to their body. It is their property.

To what extent? Does this principle apply to indentured servitude? How about work related accidents, should a company be legally required to prevent them? Should a mining company pay compensation for the lung damage sustained by their miners, even though that was not in their contract? How about the environment, does this principle imply I have a right to breathe fresh air? How about drinking water?

>Whether laws exist regarding private property (or the lack thereof), we can define a set of natural rights that any person has regardless of any local, regional, or global laws, constructs, or ideologies.

You can, but it doesn't mean I or anyone else will agree to them.

>We can all agree murder is wrong, rape is wrong, stealing is wrong, slavery is wrong

No, we can't. People used to think slavery was ethical. What changed? Raping and plundering used to be ethical for a victorious army. What changed? Today the majority of the world eats meat, and it is very possible that in a century we will be seen as primitive carnivores.

You are also not defining what constitutes these crimes. Is capital punishment murder? Is it murder to kill an enemy soldier? How about an enemy civilian? How about collateral damage? Is it slavery if a company destroys all your other options, forcing you to work for them on their terms?

Is it unethical for companies to collude and fix prices or wages? Is it unethical when workers do the same? Is it unethical when a company pays the local police to break a strike?

The thought that "you only own your body, and you have to earn everything else" falls down pretty quickly once you look outside that idealistic bubble and see historical or ongoing issues.

[quacked]

There's an even more powerful counterargument to the facetious notion that "we all agree that murder/rape/slavery is wrong" than "people used to think it was right".

People today still think those crimes are right, as evidenced by the fact that there are many people who still do them. That's why we have laws against those crimes: to punish the many thousands of people who still attempt to carry them out, and in many cases succeed.

If we could "all agree that they were wrong", then we wouldn't need laws against those crimes, because no one would ever commit them.

[ajmadesc]

Why are we entitled to property?

[bakuninsbart]

> The issue is that nobody is entitled to anything.

That's an ideological statement. You may subscribe to it, but not everyone has to. Society is fundamentally based on the notion of shared rights and duties, what these rights and duties entail can be up for debate, but if you don't want to owe anyone, you will have to live a pretty lonely, primitive existance in Siberia or Alaska.

[robotresearcher]

Ironic choice of hermitage, since if you live in Alaska, you're entitled to free money from a communal fund.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

[dependenttypes]

> a pretty lonely

Nowadays with the internet one does not need to be lonely even if they are away from society.

In addition others might decide to follow them.

> primitive existance in Siberia or Alaska.

This does not make much sense. Why would living somewhere else automatically give them any duties?

Anyway, I do not see the point of this argument. It is like saying to a gay person "if you don't want to be discriminated by anyone, you will have to live a pretty lonely, primitive existance in Siberia or Alaska."

[frenchyatwork]

> Nowadays with the internet one does not need to be lonely even if they are away from society.

How are you going to pay for the internet? If you want to operate with state currency, you need to abide by the rules of the state. Render unto Caesar ...

Edit: I suppose you could try doing it with bitcoin. Best of luck if you try!

[dependenttypes]

Guess we have to give up on trying to protect our freedoms. After all living alone is bad, right?

Time to forget all the issues regarding privacy too, after all in order to not be tracked by facebook we have to live in siberia.

[kevin_b_er]

And the end result is the lack of a right to life. For life requires sustenance. And if there's too few with all the resources, you are denied the right to life.

As a result, I can consider a libertarian to be genocidal. For they would be mostly fine with a Holodomor.

[JoeAltmaier]

...and because workers show up to make it run, and because everybody pays taxes for the roads and electricity, and on and on.

We could have a dog-eat-dog society like Mad Max or something. Or we could set simple rules and live a decent life. Its kind of what Democracy is about.

[ccffpphh]

You don't need taxes for roads or electricity. In the same way we don't need taxes for grocery shopping, or education.

Workers indeed show up and make things run, but only because they voluntarily chose to agree to a contract where that is their duty. If they don't like the terms of their contract, they can not take it, renegotiate their current one, find a new one, or take on risk and start your own income. You can't "accidentally" fall into a job.

[JoeAltmaier]

About the "don't need taxes" thing: That's a laughable fallacy. In this modern world of interrelated dependencies, the days of "somebody will probably build a road just when its needed, Libertarianism could work. Really! Just let random people run the whole society at random, that'd work great"

We have to grow up, and recognize that as our country grew from 10M to 450M people, certain processes and activities have to be streamlined and organized. You don't run the company by letting folks show up for shifts at random and hope for the best. You don't run a country's infrastructure that way either.

[mattmanser]

Risk is a strong word, often there's little risk involved, it's often more about who you know, which entitlements your birth gave you and what parachute mummy and daddy can give you (especially if you're white, male and privately educated).

There's no inherent entitlement or human right to give your children your money, or to not be simply turfed off what ever land you are using when society decided there's a better use for it, for a competitor simply stealing your inventory, expecting protection from thugs taking your business etc., etc.

Because wealth begats wealth, there needs to be certain checks and balances, minimum wages are one of them, inheritance taxes and capital gains taxes are others.

For that, you get the protection of strong laws, an infrastructure you paid almost nothing towards, legal protections for your property, protection from foreign governments, access to skilled trained workers you didn't pay to educate, etc.

Your argument is circular, Fred is wealthy and can afford to speculate, therefore Fred deserves more wealth.

But Fred is only wealthy when everyone else buys into the system, otherwise Fred would soon be Dead Fred.

[ccffpphh]

There is risk in any action taken due to the fundamental lack of information regarding events occurring in the future. I agree with you that much of it is luck, this at the same time does not mean because one is born lucky that they now need to suffer to bring someone else to their level. I disagree that it is meaningless, I believe that since no one person is entitled to anything from anyone else (to think otherwise would be to support slavery), the only morally correct form of interaction is through consensual voluntary action.

I do not think we need checks and balances. Minimum wage actually harms those who are most disadvantaged - if I am hiring two people and I must pay them the same amount, there's no reason I would take the socially less valuable person. At the very least, eliminating the floor would allow the disadvantaged to compete and make racists pay for their prejudice, i.e. "Do I really want to pay $10.00 for a white straight privileged [whatever insert here] or $5.00 for a black trans [etc]".

Inheritance tax is violence against those who pass on their wealth. If you have indeed earned so much that you would like to ensure your lineage, what right does anyone else have to stop you? Why is it wrong for you pass on wealth to your children? Whose business is it? What if instead, you simply lived a thousand years and kept your wealth?

If you want to donate money because you are very rich and have a lot of money to spare and truly believe this, then by all means, you can even pay more in taxes nowadays and never file a return. Nobody will stop you.

[arp242]

The problem with no inheritance tax is that it destroys individual merit. In an ideal free and liberal society everyone would start from the same point and achieve the things they achieve in life based on their individual merit. Such a scenario driven to its extremes would be a dystopian Brave New World-like horror, but we can certain level the playing field somewhat by ensuring that some don't start with millions in their pocket whereas others start with 0.

There is an absolute mountain of evidence that the economic status of your parents is a strong influencer of your own economic status. This is the cause of a great many problems, including things like the problems with the black community in the US for example.

Your entire argument on this is a contradiction; no one is entitled to anything yet you are entitled to the money from your parents? What right do your children have on the money someone else earned with their merit? Let them prove their own worth.

[mattmanser]

I stopped reading when you started directly contradicting the fact based article with an armchair philosopher supposition.

Your view is merely dogmatic and ignorant, the opposite of what I come to HN for.

[dependenttypes]

The irony here...

[coliveira]

The argument goes both sides. No company is entitled to receive profits on the products it creates or the money it invests, just because it exists. There is no reason to believe or accept that companies and investors should have more protections from losses than workers.

[ccffpphh]

I agree!

[tfehring]

So capital is entitled to a return but labor isn't? Why the distinction?

[throwaway894345]

The parent said "no one is entitled to anything". I take that to mean "neither capital nor labor is entitled to a return". It's probably also useful to scope this conversation to a certain context: "in a free market, no one is entitled to anything". This is a sort of hypothetical scenario since there are no perfectly free markets, and a completely unregulated market is very likely not a desirable thing (evolutionary forces aren't stable and stability is a prerequisite for sustained prosperity, security, etc); however, it's still a useful concept to guide discussion.

[tfehring]

They didn't explicitly say that capital is entitled to a return, but the comment pretty clearly indicated an asymmetry between capital and labor. You could invert the wording to the following

> You aren't de facto entitled to receiving a return on any capital you may provide, regardless of whether that capital is put to productive use or not. A company exists because one or more people provided their labor in order to create a net positive system.

and the tone clearly changes from the original. I agree that neither capital nor labor is entitled to a return, but I don't think that's what the parent comment was suggesting.

[throwaway894345]

Via "no one is entitled to anything", the parent explicitly said that capital is not entitled to a return. No need to read between the lines here. We can all agree that no one is entitled to anything in a free market and move on to the next question, which is probably something like "to what extent does a perfectly free market deliver on our collective objectives"? I.e., "Can we balance market freedom with some amount of regulation to deliver a system that is both prosperous and stable/sustainable/equitable/etc?".

[ccffpphh]

That's exactly what I was suggesting. The throwaway was correct.

[jmcgough]

> A company exists because one or more people risked wealth in order to create a net positive system

What about companies that exist solely as rent seekers? TurboTax is a net negative on society - congress has tried repeatedly to simply mail people a bill or refund, instead of the silly song and dance we go through now, but Intuit has lobbied aggressively to prevent this.

[ccffpphh]

Under the current government system, they clearly provide value - otherwise they wouldn't exist. Whether the government is complicit in their existence is another matter entirely - but they're not just making money appear out of thin air. They clearly provide value in streamlining the spaghetti nest of the tax code for average consumers.

The issue is with government enabling the monopoly.

[jlawson]

Only possible thanks to government policy wielded through regulatory capture. Not a free market outcome.

[dmitriid]

Ok then. What would taxes look like in a "free market" where "no one is entitled to anything"?

[OCASM]

There would be no taxes, only voluntary cooperation.

[dmitriid]

What is this ideal world, I want to live in it.

Reality and all of history tells us that doesn't work at scale.

[OCASM]

The US used to have very little taxation. It worked fine then. Ever increasing government reach wasn't always the norm.

[mdoms]

> The issue is that nobody is entitled to anything. You aren't de facto entitled to receiving money for any services you may or may not provide, regardless of whether you're skilled or not, just because you exist.

This is a value judgment you have made, and one that seems popular in USA. It's not a priori true and it's not necessarily so popular in other parts of the world.

[ccffpphh]

Are you claiming that if someone else exists, it is now your burden to ensure their living at your own expense until they die?

[mdoms]

If by my burden you mean society's burden then yes. That's why we have things like welfare and national healthcare systems.

[Klinky]

This is incredibly simplistic and reductionist thinking with regards to the development of society. It comes from a brutal, cold and careless place. The goal of societies should be to evolve beyond the brutality of nature, not regress backwards to a place where we're eating our young.

[kube-system]

Naturally? Maybe not, but many societies have decided to form governments in which their citizens are ascribed those entitlements.

[ccffpphh]

How many of those governments are just, however? Can you reasonably claim that all citizens consent to the policies of their government? If everyone agreed to murder you, would that make it ok? What about if everyone agreed to rob you of all of your property, your livelihood? What about only half of that? Quarter? A tenth? What's the right number? Non-consent to any degree is not morally right. In the same way, it would morally wrong for me to coerce you to pay me some arbitrary amount I come up with.

[kube-system]

In the interest of expediency, most groups of people have decided that democracies can make decisions as a proxy for consent, and people continually work to improve that process. Larger groups of people have all found it necessary to delegate daily governance tasks to a subset of people, because the time and effort needed to govern scales with the size of the group.

> Can you reasonably claim that all citizens consent to the policies of their government?

People will disagree with each other whether they have a government or not. Those who live ungoverned tend to experience more coercion, violence, and violations of their rights than those who are governed.

[throwaway2048]

I think we as a society can do better than whinging about how "entitled" people are for wanting to work for livable wages.