“You think we are all in our jobs voluntarily I take it?”
April 23, 2020
By NZB3
The philosopher who is below average at telling necessary conditions apart from sufficient conditions better be an above average cartoonist. Existential Comics can draw but his ideas…..terrible!
I’ve been having a conversation about what he got wrong in thinking that an entrepreneur is supposed to be able to create wealth in a vacuum..
“if the economy is crashing because people can’t find work, i don’t understand why the entrepreneurs don’t just create more wealth. i’ve been told for years that they are wealth creators.”
So bakers bake cakes eh?
Here’s no flour or kitchen…here’s a cage I’m going to stick you inside it, Jamie Oliver. Now start distributing cakes through the bars!
Look at me. I’m a economist!
“The Entrepreneur Produces Nothing”
The silly test that wealth creation grinds to a halt without labour input does not prove that it is the worker, not the entrepreneur, who is the producer. By changing Existential Comic’s test a little bit but retaining the logic, putting a baker in a cadge and demanding output, it becomes clearly absurd. You have not proven that someone is not necessary just because you’ve proven they were not sufficient in themselves.
The argument was then taken up by another who was still adamant that entrepreneurs are not necessary and, indeed, produce nothing. It was asserted that, rather than a cooperative relationship between entrepreneur and worker, there was a captive situation going on.
The argument relies on mixing up someone’s civic rights, their freedom, with their economic power. It’s the idea that someone who has low skills or less money is worth less politically as a human being; That poor people have less rights. Rather than inalienable rights for all mankind, this dehumanises some of us while elevating others because they have apparently been able to pay the money required to purchase human rights!?
Picking up off the back of the above cartoon, the argument goes like this…
when we enter a labour contract is it really voluntary? There is a huge power imbalance between the two parties, often the choice is no choice as circumstances literally force you into the only job you can find. Then when you go to work you find you have no control over not just your time, but the very essence of what makes us human – our creativity, our ability to think for ourselves, our right to autonomy – all lost. Not only that, the value we bring to raw materials is stolen away from us.
Legally, morally, politically: Yes! No contracts in our legal system are enforceable unless both parties consent. Forcing the other party voids the contract. So if not ethics, politics, or law, what is this person referring to? What are they confusing with freedom and choice?
“…when you go to work you find you have no control over not just your time, but…think for ourselves, our right to autonomy…the value we bring to raw materials is stolen away from us.”
That autonomy, that control, that value, belong to you and are yours to sell for a wage if you so choose. Your honour and innocence belong to you and you can sell them too if you want. Even your virginity and your sexual intimacy are yours to sell in the marketplace and thousands of prostitutes and politicians do take that deal. Most everyone who chooses to make such trades as these would defend it and above all their right to so transact.
In a low-production economy those sorts of choices are most of what is on offer. In pre-Industrial England, in the third world, in pre-Colonial New Zealand,…we were poor so opportunities were few. In a stronger economy with more wealth the people who get to be part of that have more choices. We can up-skill, we can spend years of childhood being educated instead of being child labourers. We can invest in our children so they can be scholars for 20-odd years before entering the workforce.
Eg. A coalminer and a washerwoman with minimum autonomy over their labours or time could imbue their children with economic value so that they could surpass them. Their children could be doctors or writers who never had to work their way up through the low-autonomy phase.
When New Zealand was just getting started, such attitudes were conscious. The Otago Scots in particular were fanatical about educating their kids. Stories abounded about individuals bettering themselves and working their way out of the low-choice and low-autonomy lifestyle that was otherwise humanity’s inheritance going back beyond antiquity. This largely topped out with the Boomer generation who resolved to take what they have received but not pass it on.
So maybe you’re a Gen X or a Millennial and wondering where your booster rockets are? Why don’t you have your pick of jobs? Why can’t you have a role in society of high value and one in which you can be creatively expressed? Why aren’t you one of the people with those skills and can’t find such a place? Why can’t you just reach out and take it like some Boomer, why do you have to sweat for it like some Colonial pioneer or Third World ‘slum dog’ who would love to be in your place?
Such questions become a poverty trap if you dwell on them at the expense of taking self-responsibility for your own life; You die of resentment and look for someone else to blame. I fear that’s what leads many who are Anarchists to the Left.
This is also why the economy and its growth are essential to our lives. That’s another insight that people cannot process because they don’t know what the economy is or that they were born free but happiness is to be pursued.
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Image ref. Child labour; History.com
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