[SllX]

What’s “fair” is generally what is accepted by the parties involved. Even if you complain about the compensation, if you’re working at a particular rate, you have implicitly agreed to that rate rather than seeking a higher compensating position.

Slaves don’t get a choice in the matter. Mobsters and kidnappers are criminals.

Living is a choice, and in order to do so it is expected that you gather your own food and find your own shelter and we’ve structured society in a way that makes that easy. You can even form a relationship with someone where you merge your resources and time to make it easier and raise other people to eventually replace you.

But if you would prefer to hunt and gather and compete with other humans through a more violent means, that option is probably available to you somewhere and you can go seek that out on your own but it’ll probably be a shorter life.

I won’t tell you how to live, but however you do it, it won’t be without cost to you as it isn’t for any of us even if the cost is much more marginal for some than for others.

[coldtea]

>What’s “fair” is generally what is accepted by the parties involved. Even if you complain about the compensation, if you’re working at a particular rate, you have implicitly agreed to that rate rather than seeking a higher compensating position.

Both implicit and explicit agreement can be problematic, depending on the conditions under which you give them.

[SllX]

Well you’re not wrong.

[mdekkers]

Your argument depends entirely on scarcity of life-sustaining resource. We’ve objectively not had that situation for quite a while. What we have had, and still have, is a situation where scarcity of resources is artificially generated or maintained.

Whilst we are being pushed to accept artificial stratification on economic and class levels, there are only two political / economic classes. The ultra rich hoarders of resources, and everyone else. The “everyone else” group represents 99% of the global population, making the hoarders a statistical anomaly. Those folk, however, have amassed $26 _trillion_ dollars of resources, just during the pandemic.

The asinine suggestion of “you are free to go out and hunt” only has meaning when you remain oblivious to the fact we are _all_ enslaved and we only get the illusion of choice about which set of bastards get to pretend to represent our interests.

There is enough to cover the basic needs of everyone on this planet. We just need to get rid of a few powerstructures before we can get to it.

We are being conned.

[SllX]

> Your argument depends entirely on scarcity of life-sustaining resource. We’ve objectively not had that situation for quite a while. What we have had, and still have, is a situation where scarcity of resources is artificially generated or maintained.

If you’ve solved the free-rider problem and have solved logistics, then you have a point, but I’m doubtful to both of those things.

Just so we’re not losing context here, what I originally replied to was this:

> Isn’t the entire concept of employment meant to scam you out of more value for your labor than what you put in?

If employment is a scam, who is doing the work of maintaining farms and fields and transporting food to well, I guess not to market, but to people? And who is doling it out?

What’s the reward for growing more food than you need?

> The asinine suggestion of “you are free to go out and hunt”

The real reason it’s asinine is that it isn’t scalable. We can sustain some of the people hunting some of the time, but we can’t sustain all of the people hunting all of the time. This is an actual lifestyle that people still practice and the primary source of their food is hunting and gathering. It’s not a lot of people, but it’s some, and the issue is if everyone did it, yes we would have literal violent disputes over hunting grounds and lose most of the world’s population to starvation and war, not to mention all the quality of life improvements we would be giving up.

So we specialize, and in order to specialize we need trade, we need an economy, and we need incentives to do the things we do. Feeding my neighbors is honestly not an incentive for me to work, as crass as that may seem to actually say. Giving them shelter means someone has to construct it, and they probably need land (that’s probably parceled to someone else) and materials (that places like Home Depot sell) and laborers who want something in return, usually this is money because it’s fungible and can represent anything. Then you need the guy to organize it all and pay people and provide the equipment. Usually this guy is the capitalist, quite literally the provider and owner of capital for the business whatever the business may be (building shelter in this example) and since he’s not working for free either, he’s probably looking to sell the shelter to you for a sum denominated in the local currency or retain ownership and rent it out to you. In either scenario, the shelter isn’t entitled to you for free, so yeah, you work for it. Or one of your ancestors did and left you enough money to pay for it. Or left you their own shelter when they died (and y’know, it still needs to be maintained, so maybe you work to do that and keep the fridge stocked and operational).

That’s what living means in this world, and dealing with that low level stuff on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs kind of comes first. So you do it basically because nobody will do it for you, and to be honest, doesn’t really want to do it for you except maybe your parents. Humanity isn’t some big family, or part of a single organizational structure with a chain of command, or all marching to the same drum beat in the same direction forward.

[tacocataco]

Slaves have a choice. Slavery or death.

[Kudos]

Do you think that's an important or useful distinction in this context?

[SllX]

I think that depends on their circumstances. Slavery is already illegal, and there isn’t really a market for slaves to go around negotiating the terms under which they are being kept alive at the pleasure of someone else so they may not be able to physically execute a suicide even if they can mentally get past the fact that they don’t actually want to die.

Also being kept alive in bondage isn’t actually compensation. I mean there are many reasons slavery is an abominable practice, this is one of them, definitely one of the big ones.