[eesmith]

Freedom only for the owners of companies?

Or do you also respect the freedom of employees to engage in collective bargaining, the freedom of employees to negotiate a closed shop with the company, the freedom to engage in solidarity and political strikes, the freedom to carry out secondary boycotts, and so on.

Most of those are prohibited by law, where 100 years ago they were legal. And they didn't require a special law to enable those powers, because they grew out of the right to quit one's job.

> If businesses have to compete, they'll try to make things as nice as possible for the workers.

Which is why businesses don't like to compete, and will form cartels and informal agreements to prevent competition.

> I'm too lazy to look it up, but I keep hearing that in the old days, people could afford to buy houses and feed a family on a single salary.

We also had a lot higher tax rate on the wealth. And stronger union power. If you're going to lazily cherry pick history, then there are a lot of cherries to pick from.

[misslibby]

> Freedom only for the owners of companies?

Everybody can start a company - or should be allowed to, that is the point. Socialist rules making it difficult prevent people from becoming independent.

> Or do you also respect the freedom of employees to engage in collective bargaining, the freedom of employees to negotiate a closed shop with the company, the freedom to engage in solidarity and political strikes, the freedom to carry out secondary boycotts, and so on.

People should be free to do that, but "employers" should also be free to fire them if they do.

> Which is why businesses don't like to compete, and will form cartels and informal agreements to prevent competition.

That works by government intervention and freedom would prevent it.

> We also had a lot higher tax rate on the wealth. And stronger union power. If you're going to lazily cherry pick history, then there are a lot of cherries to pick from.

I am not the person who claimed things were so bad in the past that we must not go back.

[shadowgovt]

This is a country of over three hundred million people. Independence past a certain degree is intractable.

I recommend if you don't like the rules and are too lazy (as you've self-described) to do the hard work to change them, you should consider changing countries. After all, your remedy for employees who don't like working for employers who break the Equal Employment Act is they should change companies.

If that solution seems unpalatable, meditate upon why it is inappropriate to suggest that employees who don't like being discriminated against should just use the remedy of changing employers.

[misslibby]

I don't live in the US.

What socialist like you keep forgetting is that somebody has to provide the jobs that you claim the rights to. If nobody provides the jobs, you can make laws all you want, people still won't have jobs.

[shadowgovt]

We've been running that experiment for upwards of a century.

It turns out there are a couple motivating factors for why people form companies, including:

1. There's something they want to do and they need a lot of people to do it

2. They want to make a lot of money

3. They want to set their own work conditions

Socialist policies don't really impact motivation 1 (in fact, they can enhance it; one way American firms are hamstrung relative to their international peers is they have to pay directly for healthcare for their employees, whereas other countries treat that as a national-level responsibility that doesn't come asymmetrically out of various firms' pocketbooks). And motivation 2 is still satisfied if they're making $10 million instead of $10 billion, so long as $10 million is the number you're making when you're "winning the game." Motivation 3 is still very much a liberty that every company owner has, with only a few curtailments (not really any more than the notion that my driver's license gives me liberty to drive on public roads, even though I'm not allowed to drive on the left side of a divided road directly into oncoming traffic).

People have been predicting "socialism will kill the desire to make work for people" for decades as myriad nations have developed stronger government support for citizens' needs, and it hasn't happened. Sooner or later, one has to accept the evidence is against the "socialism kills jobs" hypothesis.

The US has more socialist policies in place right now than ever before, and unemployment is under 4%.

[misslibby]

Most companies don't need lots of people. And setting their own work conditions is exactly what is at stake - which also impacts workers, as it also limits their choice of companies to work for. I also doubt wanting to make a lot of money is as common as you think - you can do that more easily in some corporate jobs these days, without the risk.

I don't know the extent of socialism in the US, but it certainly isn't a socialist country yet. Yes, we have run the experiment in the past, and all socialist countries failed spectacularly.

There is no such thing as free health care. Whether companies pay directly or via taxes doesn't really make a difference. The system in the US seems weird in various ways. All the "free health care" systems in other countries seem to be struggling a lot, by the way. None of them is really a proven solution as of now.

[shadowgovt]

> Most companies don't need lots of people. And setting their own work conditions is exactly what is at stake

Great, if they don't need lots of people the Equal Employment Act shouldn't be a problem for them. There's a minimum size on enforcement of the law.

I really think you're overestimating how difficult it is to avoid creating a hostile work environment. You just follow up on reports. That's what you do. There's a whole standardized process to it and every company does it. The fact that Tesla failed to follow it (and failed so hard a jury originally awarded over $100 million in punitive damages, a number speaking to their outrage and disgust at what was allowed to occur) makes Tesla an outlier here.

Point blank: do you think the goal it is trying to achieve is correct but the method is flawed, or do you think the goal (changing, by law, the environment so that an entire demographic of Americans have any hope of having a job without harassment based on unchangeable characteristics they have) is wrong?