[PrinceRichard]

The plight of miners is one of the obvious go-tos when we try to explain why government must act to regulate industry. One day a friend pointed out something interesting - that those jobs were taken on by the free choice of the individuals working them.

What should be done when an individual or group offers a job with poor conditions and wages? Presumably if the job is so bad that noone wants it, noone will take it. If someone does want it, and the two parties mutually agree to the conditions, it is not our business to intervene, other than to keep the peace.

It is not the role of government to dictate working conditions or any other terms of employment that are mutually agreed upon by those involved. If there is a disagreement, the interested parties should seek an agreement, and if none can be reached, part ways. Physical violence may not be used to pressure either side to capitulate to the desires of the other. Employers, as with anyone, are to be held accountable for injuries or death resulting from their negligence or misconduct.

Government must give neither labor nor employers special rules or treatment. Employers, as individuals, must be free to hire or release anyone they choose. Individual workers must be free act collectively - or not - and to offer their labor under any terms they choose. Neither side may use physical violence to achieve their ends.

It is indeed true that mining jobs were and are often disrespectful to the human dignity and wellbeing of the workers. Yet, workers seek out these jobs and offer their labor voluntarily. Consentual agreements are not exploitation. If a person is dissatisfied with their job, it is their responsibility to remove themselves from it.

It is also true that poor people are under more economic pressure to take on bad jobs. What should be done? Can we mandate that only safe and well-paying jobs will be offered? We could try, and that choice would inevitably exascerbate the poverty of those people by reducing the availability of employment to them. Further, they would be exposed to even more dangerous and low-paying illegal work.

In the end, the principle of human freedom offers reliable guidance.

[teddyh]

To quote myself¹:

Some volontary transactions are nonetheless illegal, because to allow them would negatively affect society as a whole. The usual example is that it is not legal (as it once was) to sell yourself into slavery. Also, overly onerous contracts can (in many jurisdictions) not be enforced.

Simply put, “It's a voluntary transaction” can never be a sufficient argument for why something ought to be legal.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26131725

[masswerk]

Mind that this "principle of human freedom" incentivizes the system to bring and keep as many potential workers as possible in those poor economic conditions in order to optimize on labor cost at the cost of human health, happiness and freedom.

[dredmorbius]

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.

-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

It may be said that of this hard lot no one has any reason to complain, because it befalls those only who are outstripped by others, from inferiority of energy or of prudence. This, even were it true, would be a very small alleviation of the evil. If some Nero or Domitian were to require a hundred persons to run a race for their lives, on condition that the fifty or twenty who came in hindmost should be put to death, it would not be any diminution of the injustice that the strongest or nimblest would, except through some untoward accident, be certain to escape. The misery and the crime would be that any were put to death at all. So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements.

-- John Stuart Mill, Chapters on Socialism