this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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Antiwork
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We're trying to reduce the numbers of hours a person has to work.
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We talk about the end of paid work being mandatory for survival.
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I think a lot of people have trouble understanding the difference between "I don't want to contribute anything to society" and "I don't want to spend half my waking life laboring for peanuts so that my boss can get rich".
Obviously, we should contribute according to our means, but we need to be compensated for those contributions accordingly.
This is the part they object to, thanks to the proliferation of Econ 101 thinking. Market wages are, after all, competitive by definition. For someone that hasn't gone beyond basic economics, what you're paid for the work you do is fair compensation.
The anti-work rhetoric is, first of all, incredibly misleading for people who take things at face value. But more important, the underlying theory for why market wages aren't fair is different for each person you talk to. There is no coherent, rhetorically forceful reasoning for why people should be paid more. And separate messages that arrive at the same conclusion aren't really effective at scale.
Getting paid better would be nice, but that will just bring the middle class closer to poverty. I've been a part of this community for a few years now and I have been fighting for better wages this whole time. But the biggest pain to me is inflation. Things keep costing more and more, but I keep making the same amount of money. Wouldn't price regulations be a better solution to all of this to all of this? Not trying to start a fight, but looking for a slight skew from the topic.
What would that solve though?
I mean say, a loaf of bread is price regulated at $3/loaf. Do we treat it like the minimum wage and let it sit there for 15 years at $3? What about bread producers? After a few years, they're certainly not getting paid the market price for their production. Is that justified to ensure that bread remains at $3?
The problems of price controls are demonstrated quite convincingly with rent controls versus just building affordable housing: the former doesn't increase the housing supply which means, even if rent is affordable, some people remain homeless.
Idk, how are thinking about it?