Replying to Avatar Toshi

Don't mistake my disagreement for a misunderstanding.

I'll try to make it very simple for you.

If a business owner employs a person for 40 hours a week, that business owner is deriving value from that person. If that person were, as you say, providing "worthless unskilled labour", the business owner would not employ that person in the first place. The very act of employing the person implies that the owner derives value from the person. So your argument about a person having no skills is nonsense, because the person has to have some skills or they wouldn't be employed. It also doesn't matter if that person has never had a job before.

So far there is no argument. If you can think logically, you have to agree.

Because the owner derives value from the labour of his employee, and this employee is employed full time, the salary must be high enough for the employee to live a life of dignity. We can disagree about what a decent life should look like. I think a comfortable home, healthy food and the ability to save some money is the bare minimum that should be considered a life in dignity. If you think that's too much to ask for, that's between you and God. You do you. None of my business.

Also, we are not talking about socialism at all. The idea that a business owner should pay his employees properly doesn't come from a socialist perspective, it comes from a place of basic human decency. The fact that some people seem to have no problem exploiting other people makes the law a necessity. A law is not socialist. A law is there to protect the weak. You can believe in a world without government, but just as communism is a fairy tale, this kind of libertarianism is also a fairy tale. Nice idea, it won't work. There must always be a balance, in everything.

If you're actually serious...

Let's say I'm a business owner of a fishing company. I'm going to hire you to run one of my boats. Let's say you think $100k per year is necessary for you to be comfortable. And fuel & maintenance for the boat is $20k per year. If you don't catch more than $120k worth of fish then it makes more sense for me to put the boat up on jacks than to pay you your "comfortable" salary.

Productivity dictates your maximum pay.

And if the monetary value of your productivity comes in below your desired comfortable salary, then you have no job & get paid nothing. Just because a person gets hired does not mean that a company wants to keep them no matter the cost of continuing to pay them.

I honestly can't believe this has to be explained. You sound like someone who has never done any real work at all.

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Just stack sats Jeff and let it play out.

Clearly not serious enough to provide an actual argument.

Starts out with some reasonable observations and then falls off a cliff

Into horseshit sophistry at being paid enough to "live a life of dignity".

40 hour week=unspecified or vague definition of

Not an argument.

Specifics. Define it or shut it.

I get this from socialists, Marxist, an comms, etc. complete babble.

You seem to misunderstand what I am saying. I have never said that a company needs to retain anyone. Quite the opposite.

So let’s take your example and let's say you're the owner of a fishing company. I run your boats, but I don't make enough money for you to pay me a living wage. Because you are the business owner, you can fire me and hire someone else. If the next person doesn't catch enough fish, you can fire that person too and hire a better fisherman. If you've hired 10 people and you've had to fire them all because it's not working out, you should think about whether your business is actually capable of being profitable. If your business is not able to generate enough revenue for you to pay your employees properly, then your business is shit. That was one of the first things I said to you in our conversation. If your business is not profitable enough to pay your employees properly, then you are essentially a ghost company that relies on exploiting people. Either you are profitable enough or you are not. You always have the option to go fishing yourself.

But anyway. I know you won’t agree with me. And I don’t really care. Like Satoshi said it so beautifully: “If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you.”

Sure, if a business owner has unrealistic expectations then he will eventually go out of business. But people who willingly agree to work at a certain rate of pay, are not being exploited. You are free to quit at any time just like your employer is free to fire you at any time. It's a voluntary & mutually beneficial exchange.

If you want businesses to be required to meet some standard of pay independent of employee performance then you are creating a situation where life will be considerably worse for the poorest & least skilled people, because it will be economically impossible to hire them to do anything. People take low paying jobs because it's the best they can get & low pay is better than no pay.