[freefaler]

The free market could do that without unions. Doing so increases the cost of labor in the product as % of the total price. You're super highly valued employee, your employer will be more than happy to buy your work in packages of 4 days instead of 5 if it suits him and you. Also if this is not suitable for one party of the deal (either employee or employer) both can go and freely trade/buy their labour.

However, generally advocates propose a blanket "mandatory 35 hours week", which have many negtive consequences:

- Why do you need to "enforce" that to other people who can't or wan't earn the same way and are more than happy to work overtime because they need to say earn more to pay medical bills or want to save to buy a house? Isn't that limiting the amount I as a person can sell my own work hours to the business?

- How can the business compete on the local market when other companies aren't forced to do work with the same cost base for the labour component in the final product?

- How can the business compete with the Mexican company across the border who can do it for even cheaper?

Free markets are very brutal and at the first glance are bad for humans, but their efficiency gives the tax base for redistribution. Also they're inherently moral, because if you can do something for your fellow citizens and swap your labor for their money and back, then you shouldn't expect to be entitled to their surplus earning redistributed via the welfare system.

In tribes in the olden days, when a person got sick/too old, many tribes just left him to die, because they couldn't afford to feed him. Societies are much wealthier now, but we shouldn't forget that starvation and poverty are the default state, not the other way around.

[Pet_Ant]

> Free markets are very brutal and at the first glance are bad for humans, but their efficiency gives the tax base for redistribution. Also they're inherently moral, because if you can do something for your fellow citizens and swap your labor for their money and back, then you shouldn't expect to be entitled to their surplus earning redistributed via the welfare system.

At first, you seem like a sensible person, but then you seem to be completely ignorant as to what "moral" means.

[freefaler]

You can't feed poor people with "morals", you need a productive tax base and good redestribution system to do that.

If you have a farm, you can't kill your chicken to feed the starving neighbour if your own chidren are starving. You need to keep the chicken alive because they will feed you and if they produce enough eggs you can help your neighbour too.

When you overtax your companies you make them uncompetitive and you have less tax to redistribute. It's just simple mathematics, no morals are needed to understand that. No tax = no social safety nets. Tax comes from profit. Profit comes from margin. Margin is destroyed by higher costs. If you increase the cost, you need to close the border so all the companies can share the same cost of labor. You'll squeeze more from the companies and make more social payments but less capital for the companies to invest and hire more people. So you're just making the stuff companies produce more expensive for all. (because you need to close the border to remove outside competition)

It's not rocket science. When societies got rich then they started having social nets, not before.

[robocat]

> Tax comes from profit

This idea leads to ungood thinking.

If true it would be equally true to senselessly say that expenses/wages come from profit?

This is clearest when you think of the variety of cases where an employee pays their own taxes.

[freefaler]

Where do you think the tax comes from? If there is no profit, there is no business and there is no tax base?

Taxes currently are for both the busness and the employees.

On the producer side: - business pays tax on sales (or VAT)

- business pays tax on profit left

- business pays tax on each employee in the form of empolyers "contributions" (just another way to tax the work of the empolyees)

- persons pay income taxes and social contributions

- persons (owners) pay divident taxes

On the consumer side

- sales/VAT tax

- import duties on stuff you buy

- various local taxes on property, vehicles and etc

In EU many contries have on the producing side 35-39% and on consuming side around 20% VAT, e.g. the govenment takes about 50% of an average workers pay.

Who pays the worker? The business by making a profit.

[robocat]

A good explanation is both correct and tactful. I'm not sure your comment is either of those things.

I think the root cause is that you are trying to use the one word "profit" to mean different things. Admittedly the word profit is poorly defined (good financial reporting doesn't use it). For example:

> business pays tax on profit left

No. A company's profit is what is left after expenses and taxes (if you disagree with that then I'm unsure what to say). I am not an accountant so I'm not going to try and define earnings for you (gross, net, etcetera). Your sentence is just incorrect: maybe incorrect for the same underlying reason as why I wrote my original comment?

I could dissect many of your other points for being oversimplified or country specific (different juisdictions do things wildly differently). For example VAT/GST systems and US sales taxes have very little commonality (think where the money goes and what can be claimed).

> Who pays the worker? The business by making a profit.

Obviously incorrect, since a company can pay their workers and make a loss. Losses can go on for a long time (some people have different incentives than company dividends).

I think overall you are trying to say that businesses need profits (that's almost a tautology) and that governments need businesses. That makes sense.

Rationally you might think that people should therefore want profitable businesses. Unfortunately, voters and governments don't actually have to make economic sense over periods of many years.

[freefaler]

> Obviously incorrect, since a company can pay their workers and make a loss.

It's not incorrect, it's a simplified model. For debt to occur this capital should be generated somehow. It's true that you can finance a business by getting the profit from some other entity that has generated the profit. So it's not wrong to assume that the money hasn't just appeared out of thin air to fund the salaries. No profitable business no capital to invest.

> Unfortunately, voters and governments don't actually have to make economic sense over periods of many years.

No matter how long the stupidity lasts that doesn't mean that this model is incorrect. No profits = no taxes in the grand scheme of things.

[analognoise]

> The free market could do that without unions.

I suggest doing some reading about labor movements, the Gilded Age, or about current issues - wealth inequality, housing costs, environmental impact, healthcare costs, enshittification.

The free market has failed miserably across multiple dimensions - even Trump has the government owning companies now (Intel). The “free market” has been a failed idea for a long time.

> In tribes in the olden days, when a person got sick/too old, many tribes just left him to die, because they couldn't afford to feed him.

We have archeological evidence that contradicts this directly! What are you even talking about?

This isn’t a good way to structure a society, but your whole point about mixing morality with capitalism is perhaps the worst one.

If you can’t look at the damage to people (and the environment) under our current system and point out how it is broadly immoral, I would suggest taking a closer look at the very least.

[freefaler]

I've read a lot and I have been in the buisness since I was 21 years old, almost homeless student in a big city that had to postpone my degree to survive so I've had years to think from the both sides of the "inequality" divide and I got a degree in economics.

You assume that if there is a price on it than there is a free market for it. It's not true at all...

Compare the freedom of the markets that are inefficient in your example:

- housing: one of the most regulated and non-transparent markets with zoning laws and NIMBYism blocking new supply to the market

- healthcare: even more regulated market for practitioners (licence to heal), medical supplies (licences for medicines) and a brocken system that incumbents can't enter (check cost+drugs Mark Cuban's post about how shitty the system is and how far away from normal free market)

- enivronmental impact: that's what the taxes are for and to have a good tax base you tax the polutants, but it's not "the market" it's "the people who consume" in any market free or not you'll get the resources used. In non-free markets you will just use more resources, because the encumbents will extract +400$ for 8Gb ram upgrade of your macbook pro or 10000 USD for a broken leg, that could've done much more if it wasn't inefficiently extorted.

- enshittification: this happens only in the "ecosystems" with no markets inside.

If you go to the freeer markets you'll see that the prices got down, not up. (check the price of computers, electronics and clothes for example).

There are some areas where the market is not the answer, but there humanity hasn't found a better way to optimize resources and ensure freedom unless the people have the ability to change their goods freely without restriction of the third party.

[freefaler]

Read about how the Japanese left their old in a practice called 姨捨 (Ubasute) .

You miss the point of the argument, that when there isn't enough food, then this happens.

[raw_anon_1111]

Do you really want to cite Trump as a rational decision maker?

[analognoise]

No, he’s the opposite of that.

But next time people say “we could just seize it”, we have precedent. From a Republican, no less!