It's not voluntary unless/until you can find me a place where housing/land is free.
Sure, the slavery is "distributed" across multiple actors such as landlords & profit off the whole concept of property as an asset, but ultimately the net result is the same - you have to work just to be afforded shelter.
The end result is that you work or you die (out of exposure, medical bills, etc). Not much different from the slavery from the old days?
The conspicuous difference is that you can choose who to work for and in consequences employers have to compete for labor, which is why the overwhelming majority of people make more than minimum wage.
You're also setting up a catch 22 where things like housing construction, which require labor to exist, are a prerequisite to not having slavery, but if no one has to do labor to construct housing then where does it come from?
Minimum wage is an arbitrary construct that may have been reasonable when it was initially introduced but due to dysfunctional politics/corruption (or "lobbying") hasn't been updated to reflect the cost of living especially with regards to property prices, so making minimum wage isn't a high bar.
> where things like housing construction, which require labor to exist
That's why I mentioned land and not only housing. In fact in most places the land is more expensive than the building on top. Even if you hypothetically wanted to just put a tent somewhere and not require on any external labor, you'd still need to buy/rent the land first.
> Minimum wage is an arbitrary construct that may have been reasonable when it was initially introduced but due to dysfunctional politics/corruption (or "lobbying") hasn't been updated to reflect the cost of living especially with regards to property prices, so making minimum wage isn't a high bar.
Irrelevant. The point is that you could set the minimum wage to zero and people would still make wages higher than that because employers have to compete for labor.
> That's why I mentioned land and not only housing. In fact in most places the land is more expensive than the building on top.
But this is really not any different -- depending on how you define it land is either a scare resource you can't get any more of at all or something that requires labor to create more of, e.g. by building sea platforms or similar.
And people don't actually need any particular amount of land in order to have shelter. You can build an arbitrarily large amount of shelter on a given piece of land by building an arbitrarily tall building. In theory there is a limit on how tall a building you could make, but in practice if we built buildings of the largest size we know how to build on the amount of land that actually exists we would have dramatically more housing than is needed for everyone.
So the limiting factor is not actually land, it's construction, which somebody has to do in order for you to have shelter.
I disagree that the limiting factor is construction. The limiting factor is that there are significant entrenched interests based on the scarcity of property which influence any eventual laws/regulations or incentives to build more property.
> You can build an arbitrarily large amount of shelter
You can, but it isn't done, because of see above. For a lot of people/businesses in power to actually change things, it's often more profitable to defend the status-quo than make the change. It's a "tragedy of the commons" problem - it would end up better for everyone if the change were to be made, but only if it's done collectively - otherwise any individual player would be at a disadvantage.
But my original argument wasn't even about third-party constructed shelter. Even if let's say you wanted land just to put a tent somewhere and call that your home, well you can't without buying said land first, which is often priced disproportionately compared to wages (and there's pressure to keep it that way, where either wages/earning potential are pushed down, or land will just raise in price to match).
> I disagree that the limiting factor is construction. The limiting factor is that there are significant entrenched interests based on the scarcity of property which influence any eventual laws/regulations or incentives to build more property.
Now you're making a completely different argument: Not that the problem is that you have to work in order to buy housing, but that the cost of housing is too high because of artificial restrictions on housing construction.
Which is totally true but is something else entirely -- if housing cost 10% of what it does now, it still wouldn't be free.
> It's a "tragedy of the commons" problem - it would end up better for everyone if the change were to be made, but only if it's done collectively - otherwise any individual player would be at a disadvantage.
It's quite the opposite really. It would be better for anyone individually to build more housing on their land because they would make more money than the construction costs, so in order to prevent that they pass laws prohibiting nearly anybody from doing that.
These laws persist because of regulatory dysfunction. People benefit if the property they own is worth more and the property they might want to buy is worth less -- and any given person doesn't own most property, so the general advantage is to make housing cost less everywhere. But the laws that prevent it are instituted at the local level, in places zoned for single family homes that are predominantly owner-occupied, so the local voters are local homeowners who want local housing prices to go up rather than down. Meanwhile they don't get a vote in what the zoning is somewhere they might want to move to, so the rules make prices go up.
This is a real problem that could be solved by empowering individual property owners to build what they want on their own property, but what does that have anything to do with employers who are largely ambivalent to this? If anything employers should prefer housing costs to be lower so they can attract talent to their locality through a lower cost of living, and pay less in rent themselves.
> Even if let's say you wanted land just to put a tent somewhere and call that your home, well you can't without buying said land first
What are you proposing to do instead? You can't feasibly create more land, and what people actually want the land for is to have shelter. You can create more shelter, but that requires labor. It's never going to be free -- one way or another somebody has to build it. Somebody would even have to make the tent.
We could certainly make it cost less by removing zoning restrictions but less is not free.
> The point is that you could set the minimum wage to zero and people would still make wages higher than that because employers have to compete for labor.
Wrong. Profiteers learned ages ago the importance of wielding their capital for political influence to maintain a stagnant pool of unemployed surplus labor by many means, including the prison industrial complex, migrant trafficking, and more. The result is that employers do not compete for mere labor but rather only for specifically skilled labor, meaning unskilled labor is only legally differentiated from slavery and effectively just slavery. Furthermore, most of these so-called unskilled laborers are in fact highly skilled surplus of the skilled labor market, which means the same holds true for a significant portion of the so-called skilled labor pool.
> meaning unskilled labor is only legally differentiated from slavery and effectively just slavery.
Many unskilled labor jobs also pay more than the law requires, and there is basically unlimited demand for unskilled labor at low wages, so there is only a problem if the cost of living is higher than the wages unskilled labor receives in the market -- which in nearly all cases is because of artificial scarcity of necessities. Because otherwise the low wages would result in a low cost of living as necessities could be produced inexpensively through cheap labor.
If you let millions migrants come to the US to build housing and provide medical care and consequently made housing and medicine inexpensive, unskilled laborers in the US would be better off, not worse off. If you artificially limit the supply of those things so the cost of living remains high, you're screwed regardless of whether there are immigrants, because a marginal difference in the wages for unskilled labor doesn't hold a candle to a ten fold increase in the cost of living.
> Furthermore, most of these so-called unskilled laborers are in fact highly skilled surplus of the skilled labor market
There is rarely a long-term surplus of skilled labor -- or anything -- because that would just cause it to cost less, increasing demand (companies hire more) or reducing supply (people switch careers to ones that pay better).
I'm pretty sure slaves from any era would kill to have my job where I work from home, have various insurances and investments through my employer, make a lot of money that I can spend on whatever I want and more. When you abstract concepts enough, everything becomes similar but current employment in developed countries is nowhere near slavery.
Slaves from the previous era would sure kill for your job... but you might very well kill for this job 20 years down the line when all your perks have evaporated and inflation/property prices/taxes have reduced your currently-high-salary to what is effectively minimum wage?
Keep in mind that no employer/business is providing these perks out of the goodness of their heart - they do so because the market is (was?) extremely competitive, but it's not a given that the market will stay competitive.
In slavery, the enslaved is property. Their spouse and children can be sold off, you can be used as a breeder of more slaves, you eat what you can forage or what is handed to you, if you don't work harder you and your family are physically beaten. Some slaves had their achilles tendon's ruptured so they couldn't run but still could work in fields. That is just getting started and I'm not an expert in the matter (just took a few history classes).
So.. there are some really stark differences. "Wage slavery" does have similarities to an extent, but it is still a world apart.
The qualitative difference between slavery and a job is that a slave is not allowed to choose a better option if one is available. A slave is barred from taking higher paid work, work with better conditions, etc. Even if it would be beneficial for their master (e.g. they do higher value work and all of the money goes to their master) they do not have the freedom to choose. A slave does not have the freedom to improve their circumstances even if it is a win-win situation. That is the qualitative difference between slavery and a job.
Really? I've never heard this and a quick google doesn't bear this out. Also, it's not clear to me what they would actually do to you if you didn't...put you in prison? Release you as punishment?
13th amendment: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
If people start using prison as this "one weird trick they don't want you to know" to not pay rent, this problem will be solved pretty quickly too (if it isn't already, as the other commenter suggests forced prison labor is a thing in some places).
You only addressed the lighthearted part of my response. I'd be much more interested in your reaction to my main point - you appear to be defining slavery as having to care for yourself. Surely you do not believe that you are owed a life of leisure do you?
> Surely you do not believe that you are owed a life of leisure do you?
I believe shelter and basic necessities should be a human right. So many problems would be solved/improved if people didn't have to spend half (or more, for the lower classes) of their earnings on perpetually renting.
You may believe that, but there has to be a means to that end (preferably one that doesn't require the oppression of others).
Shelter has to be built on a property and maintained indefinitely, food has to be painstakingly extracted from the land, etc. People have to do that, because there is no extant alternative.
Ignoring land ownership for now, are the maintainers and farmers not to be compensated? That would be actual slavery.
Sure, the slavery is "distributed" across multiple actors such as landlords & profit off the whole concept of property as an asset, but ultimately the net result is the same - you have to work just to be afforded shelter.
The end result is that you work or you die (out of exposure, medical bills, etc). Not much different from the slavery from the old days?