[Avicebron]

Your spherical cow version of economics is laughably naive and misguided. If "adults" decided tomorrow that it was fine to employ people at only the infrastructure cost of preventing them running away, people would be outraged. But somehow flooding an ecosystem with money to starve meaningful competition and capitalize on people's inherent lack of options, which is "preventing them from running away with extra steps", is somehow... "a robust and dynamic economic ecosystem between consenting adults".. let's not be naive on HN.

[FredPret]

It’s reality-based, empirical economics, not “mine”.

Place that let adults choose who to work for and who to employ, and furthermore consider it improper to even use the word “let” in this context, universally have better employment situations than places that follow your “spherical cow” theoretical planned / over-regulated economies.

You seem to ascribe agency only to the employers, but remember that every Uber driver and every shitty minimum-wage job holder is almost certainly just doing their best. Making their jobs illegal will not improve their lives one iota, not in theory, and not in practice.

[array_key_first]

Similarly, a lot less children would be impoverished if they could work in factories. Time to put those little hands to use! Oh, uh, for humanity or something.

We do have to draw the line somewhere and it is arbitrary.

[FredPret]

I just knew someone would bring up child labour / slavery.

There's a big difference between gig jobs and very low-paying jobs that help free adults with no other options in life, and kids in work houses & coal mines, and you know it.

[array_key_first]

Of course there is, the broader point is there is a line and we draw it arbitrarily.

Even for slavery - we can easily argue that free housing and food would be a huge boon for a lot of people. Imagine how many homeless people can quit drugs and have a roof over their head if we just allowed them to work for just housing and food. We'd create practically infinite jobs.

But we choose not to do that because that's bad.

There's people out there desperate enough for anything. Anything. There are people who would happily sell their limbs.

The argument of "well it helps them and they want it" isn't very good. That's not how we operate generally - we need something more than that.