The government should not be allowed to “own” property or enforce victimless laws. The problem is always the government.

No that wouldn’t be possible. A slave is someone who is, for all intents and purposes, property of another against their will. If you consent to it, it wouldn’t be slavery.

It’s like theft. If you consent to give it to me I’m not stealing from you. In such an instance, you’re selling it to me, trading it to me, gifting it to me, or maybe just giving it to me as a gift. What manifests theft as theft from a fundamental idea of the essence of the idea itself is that I would need to be violating your consent - your will, as it were.

Theft is only theft when you violate will. Rape is only sex if everyone partaking consents. Even murder no longer becomes murder if there’s consent. In fact, you can kill someone who didn’t consent to dying and it still wouldn’t always be murder because the person may have consented to a risk that just so happened to end their life. Take for example if you consent to go skydiving and you fall to your death. The skydiving company didn’t murder you because you agreed to the risks of the situation that lead to your death.

Now had someone pushed you out of the airplane before you put your parachute on - which wasn’t something you agreed to have happen - then the person who pushed you out of the plane would have murdered you.

Slavery is the same thing. You’re not a slave if you’re OK with it. Now if you consented to be someone else’s property and you also consented for you to never be able to change your mind about it, well you’re an idiot. That’d be like agreeing to give your house away to someone and then being upset when you change your mind and ask for it back and they tell you no. You would never do that, so why would your own autonomy be any different?

Agreed that things like governments and corporations are made up ideas, but ideas need to be properly defined so we know what we’re communicating.

You asked if a government in your society doesn’t exist what is the agreed upon legal code?

You’re asking the wrong question. When I say that I’m against government, what I mean is I am against the idea that I can be born into an agreement and made to suffer that system. I was born and continue to live in the US, but I did not agree to give the government tens of thousands of dollars annually, which they take without my consent. I argue that all government is, fundamentally, is a relative force monopoly. If say, the drug cartels in Mexico can simply do what they wish and the Mexican government can’t stop them, then the actual government in Mexico are the drug cartels, not the Mexican government. Saying it’s not is just not properly defining what government is.

In a government where there’s freedom for all there would be two systems in place to define what is legal. One would be logic. It’s simply immoral to murder (not kill, murder), steal, rape, defraud, or assault. You cannot do those things and free people understand that even if a relative force monopoly makes a “law” saying you can, that doesn’t legitimize it, and you are well within your right, as given by nobody at all, to seek out and use violence against those who would commit those acts, regardless of what the “law” said.

If it were legal in the US to rape, would you rape? Would you allow another to rape if you had the power to stop them? Would you stop someone who tried to rape your child? Who cares what the law says?

We already realize that law does not correlate to right and wrong.

The second aspect of law would be that in which is consented to, but that depends entirely on who owns what, and I don’t mean arbitrarily owns what, but objectively (logically) owns what.

You can logically work out what is owned and what is stolen. It isn’t difficult.

And to own a thing means you hold exclusive authority over it. If I hold exclusive authority over my house for instance, then it doesn’t matter what other people agree to, or turn into “law”, you never hold authority over my house. If you do, then you are stealing my authority over my house from me, which is theft. If you use theft, I am authorized to use violence against you to stop your theft.

So it doesn’t matter how many people you have who agree to something if it pertains to violating my consent over my property. A million people can all vote and agree to kick me out of my house, and you’ll succeed if you use violence against me, but both logically and philosophically, I would be well within my right to use even deadly force to stop any thugs you send to me to do so.

A “just” law is only one where you are protecting the will of others within a logical order of operations.

Now that being said! You CAN hold agreements between owners of property. Maybe 50 people in a region all agree to buy all of the neighboring roads, and they each agree to put fourth 5% of their income per year to do so. Maybe they all agree this will be a “law”, and they agree upon a punishment that can be enacted if someone doesn’t do this. NOW what you have is a situation where you CAN use violence against someone who goes against the agreement because we’re not talking about the group violating the consent of the individual, we’re talking about the individual engaging in an action of which violated a preexisting will of the group.

Another question you had:

“Can you guarantee everyone in your society, which you’ve argued can be over 250 people, will agree on a singular legal code without some kind of government with a legislative branch?”

You don’t need to. If everyone in my “society” want to make a rule saying you can remove Joe from his home, all you’re doing is banding together to do a sinister deed. That is a corrupt society to begin with, and an authoritarian one.

You don’t and can’t agree to do something with someone else’s property, because it isn’t yours. This is like saying that your neighbor, Tony, has some kind of right to your car because he lives next door. That’s absurd. You and only you can decide what happens to your car unless what you want to do directly violates Tony’s rights over his will. For example, I can’t drive it into his house and set it on fire because I would need to have initiated an action of which violated Tony’s will, so I can’t do that.

Now if Tony and I both got together and CONSENTED to go 50/50 on a new car, it’s up to us and us alone to set the “law” on who can make utility of that car, or who can destroy it, sell it, who gets what if we agree to sell it, who maintains it, puts gas in it, etc.

You don’t get to come along and make demands of Tony and I regarding our car. It’s ours, nor yours. Leave us alone and stop trying to dictate the choices of others.

The problem with your line of questioning - and I mean with with respect, truly - is that you’re thinking about all of this in this scope of the concept of “public property”. There is no such thing. There is property, full stop. The idea of “public property” is a blatant misnomer. Think of it like this:

Menards owns a lawn mower and they agree to sell it to me. It’s my lawn mower. It’s mine because Menards did not steal anything from anyone else to make it, my will was aligned to own it and the will of those who consented to the system that is Menards hold a will to accept selling it to me, and because what I traded for it was mine as I did not steal the money I traded for it.

But if Tony next door again comes to my home with a baseball bat and tells me I am now going to give him $500 towards a lawn mower, and it will be in the best interest of the neighborhood because 9 other people all got together and agreed it was, and thus, it isn’t theft what Tony is doing, Tony is just lying - it’s just theft.

You can’t “legitimize” theft by wearing a badge or saying you come from some official sounding group name. Other people agreeing to rape you doesn’t legitimize rape any more than other people agreeing to rob you legitimizes theft. Is this making sense?

But again, if Tony and I both consent to buy a lawn mower together, then we are both consensual property owners of that lawn mower and nobody else can tell us what to do with it.

So your other two questions here aren’t the right questions to ask either:

“How do they even go about figuring out the legal code without some organization?” - and - “If they do agree on a legal code, who are the people spending time on maintaining and updating the code and how are they paid?”

Nobody ever said there wouldn’t be organization, or even violence. There could still be police, firefighters, teachers, engineers, and everything else that governments tend to monopolize or “provide”.

Who sets the laws for the roads? Well, which roads? Who owns the roads? Do I own the road leading to my home? Do Tony and I own it? Did all 50 of us who live in that area get together and consent to all go in and buy the roads? Then the owners of those roads set the laws for those roads.

Maybe Tony and I own a little piece of road and the only law is we don’t want you to go more than 40MPH while driving on it. Well there you go! And if you don’t like our ruling about our property, key words there, OUR PROPERTY, then you don’t need to use it.

I make the laws in my own home. If you don’t like it, you’re free to leave. In fact, if I asked you to leave and you flat out refused, I would just be warranted to use violence against you. If I couldn’t get you to leave with violence even, then deadly force would be warranted. And yes, that would be warranted if it got to that serious of a situation.

But that’s already how governments generally work today. If you come into my home and I ask you to leave and you refuse, I call the police and the police will use violence against you. What on earth do you think they do if you resist that violence? Play nice?

Your next question:

“How do you adjudicate this issue in your society? There’s no judicial branch of government.”

However the property owners who have been faulted want. Maybe in my area we’ve set up a system for this. What is most likely is as a “formal”, current government waned, this would open up avenues in the free market for people to offer these kinds of services. In fact, many judicial systems are already handled by courts not run by the government. Many kinds of issues even in the US are resolved by these kinds of courts because it’s better than utilizing the government to do so, as governments tend to be more corrupt, very slow, and very poor quality in basically everything they do.

Maybe you have Amazon Justice, Microsoft Courts, and Elon Musk’s Justice-X to choose from, and maybe the people in your area all consent to use a specific one so they agree to all go in and pay for those services. Maybe those small groups of people also get together with other small groups of people and form larger organizations who also agree on certain things. You can still have society without authoritarianism. The notion of, “whatever would we do if we don’t let other people rob us and our neighbors to do things” is so absurd it makes my head spin.

I’m not saying no organization. I’m not saying no schools, no security, no military, no roads, etc. I’m saying NO MORE AUTHORITARIANISM. No more theft on a grand scale. No more telling me when I turned 18 that I had to sign up for a draft where if some old man decided I had to die oversees then I either did so or I’d be locked away. No more forcing me to days of being a juror without my consent, where the state would pay me pennies a day and I lost precious time with my family, my job, and my entire life.

There is no such thing as a social contract - not within the constrains of what it’s depicted at as of current. That’s all just authoritarian propaganda.

The point here would be freedom, and what freedom logically means is that I cannot initiate actions - initiate is the key word here - that violate your will, and neither can you to me.

If you and 50 people got together and all consented to a village of debauchery, drugs, prostitution, and drunk driving, so long as you all consented, I would allow you to live that lifestyle without interruption.

I might try to convince you that there are better ways to live your life, but I wouldn’t use force against you to get you to stop.

But don’t forget that this only applies because there’s consent. If some of you enter our town where we do not agree to you doing drugs on my land or in my store, or driving drunk on the roads that our community all agreed to share ownership over, then we are justified if we not only ask you to stop or ask you to leave, but if we use violence against you to get to you if you refuse.

So to specifically answer your question, if you want to live the way you’ve described, you would absolutely be allowed to - by us, anyway.

In fact, we could even become allies whereas we agree to defend one another if another group were to come and try to use violence to force us into their ways.

The disconnect so many others face is only about freedom and nothing more. There is no such thing as a man so wise that he can make choices for other adults without their consent. Nobody knows better for me than I do and nobody knows better for my children than I do as their father (except an equal share, their mother.)

Even if you think you do, you don’t. Opinions aren’t facts, they’re opinions. Even if you THINK you have a better way of living, you don’t. The only time when you’re objectively wrong is when you’re utilizing violence for a victimless crime. Violence - legitimate, moral violence - is only for defense against things like murder, rape, theft, assault, and fraud.

When other people don’t get this it’s because psychologically they’re thinking at low levels. Low level thinking tends to be very isolated to the “me”. The higher up you go the more you begin thinking that others have wants and needs just like you do, and that your wants and needs may conflict with theirs. Many people today still think in terms of, “I want this and therefore so must you, so if you are protesting, you must be wrong, or sinister”. They cannot understand that someone else might have a want that differs from theirs, and that they aren’t wrong for having it.

I would argue that there are two forms of morals - subjective and objective. Objective morals are surrounded by the NAP while subjective morals are things like, “I don’t think you should smoke cigarettes because they could reduce your lifespan and that would cause pain to others around you, plus place additional burden on those providing healthcare and insurance.”

There’s no such thing as objective value, not even for human life, so to say your life holds value and thus, you shouldn’t smoke is just an opinion.

But you don’t need government in its current form in order to protect people from groups who mean to poison. I don’t need a cop to protect me from a home invader, for example. In fact, the cop isn’t going to get there until the invader has done whatever they sought out to do, so maybe just to try to find them after myself and my entire family are murdered.

OR I can protect my family myself.

The act of poisoning someone is in itself objectively immoral. No good people who accept responsibility for the innocent in this world should be made to suffer the will of those who seek to do that kind of harm. In fact I would argue that the government likely was deficient in what they SHOULD have done to combat the poisoning done at that time.

In my view, if 5 people are producing food (simplifying things here) and they choose to poison that food and I and some of my goodly companions find out about it, we are completely within our right to use immediate and, if necessary, deadly force against those individuals. The idea should be simple: If you want to attempt to kill people, we will find and kill you.

The good must not suffer the evil to exist, and I say that as both an staunch atheist and someone not even in favor of the death penalty (but only because I do not want even a single person killed who wasn’t guilty.)

And you talk of businesses as if they are real people, and they’re not. A business is just this made-up human idea, and an extremely broad one at that, where we’re explaining swaths of people all working together to produce some kind of goods/services under the idea of generating wealth for everyone. The idea that a company can own property for example is nonsensical. A company can own property like my car can own property, or like a sidewalk can owe me money.

When a business I work for does something nefarious, I guarantee you that I didn’t lift a finger to see that come to fruition. I was duped by others who made those choices who defrauded me by not detailing what was going on. THOSE people who did those things are criminals and should be dealt with. The notion that a company for example can do something that say, results in the murder of 10 kids isn’t an “oopsies” where the state fines that business. The mere fact that this is how we deal with these things “collectively” is seriously messed up. The people responsible for making choices they knew were risky for people’s health that then resulted in the death of those kids should be tried and convicted of murder and locked away forever, and I don’t need a huge, overarching government that I didn’t consent to in order to make that happen.

And I agree with you - governments like what we have here in the US are a hell of a lot better than they’ve been in the past. I’m not saying I want to live in Stalin’s Russia, or under the iron fist of Genghis Khan here. What I’m saying is both logically and philosophically, the next direction we as human beings should be guiding the world to is a place where there is no such thing as victimless crimes; where everyone can live their lives the way they choose and where the only time a relative force monopoly flexes its power is to prevent things like murder, rape, theft, and fraud.

You build a coalition who needs some money from me and will protect me better than police and I’ll gladly pay for that, but do you know what that would be? A business, not a government. You could argue that it’d be a government if it were a force monopoly, but so what? So long as it’s consensual and works, I’m all for it.

When I say I’m anti-government what I’m talking about is being against people using violence against us against our will and not in defense of the innocent.

You don’t abide by any kind of government. You can’t. Your will cannot align to be violated. This is why you believe the purpose of voting is for, so when one person does something with your money that you don’t agree with, you believe you can get another person who won’t do those things.

I would argue that it isn’t that you’re in favor of government, it’s that you’re in favor of a justice system, school for your kids, roads, and other infrastructure. But to say you need the system of coercion we have in place else we can’t have those things is just nonsense. Would you not pay to have security if the government didn’t do police? Is your argument that other people wouldn’t? Who are these “barbarians” who wouldn’t? Do you know them? I don’t. I don’t surround myself with people like that, so it always diverts back to this idea that it’s the “others”, the “outsiders”, the “barbarians” who wouldn’t do this stuff if not coersed. Never us.

And even if you wanted to argue that you wouldn’t want to pay for police then you’re just arguing for less government, aren’t you? If you wouldn’t pay for police unless forced, then you don’t want police that badly. This isn’t a difficult concept. If I want something, I go and buy it. If I don’t buy it, I didn’t want it that badly. I fundamentally decided that I value my money more than the good or service itself, so I didn’t make the trade.

I simply take it one step further and understand that you shouldn’t be able to take my money to do anything with that I don’t agree with. If I agreed to it I would give you the money without the coercion. When I want something, I buy it from the store. When I don’t want something, you have to take money from me to get it if you won’t buy it yourself.

There is no such thing as governments, mind you. There are only people. If your neighbor were to come to your home and tell you they want $500 to do something with and you disagreed and they returned with a weapon and threatened you unless you gave it to them, you would immediately admit that such a scenario would be both immoral and crazy. The thing is, the propaganda you’ve been raised with is duping you into believing that this isn’t exactly what’s going on because they slapped a badge on your neighbor and convinced you that it’s not theft and authoritarianism.

If your neighbor made a nice looking badge and pinned it to their lapel, would that make it official? What if 10 of your neighbors all agreed that it was official and legit? Does it make it official and legit? What about 20 neighbors? What about 50? 500?

If not 1, then not 1 billion. No number of people agreeing to something warrants that it is legitimate. It used to be that millions of people agreed in slavery and slavery has never been legitimate. It was thought by many as legitimate, but so what?

There isn’t anything wrong with government if that government isn’t robbing you - that’s the rub. All a government really is is a relative force monopoly. If the government vanished tomorrow and your neighbors all gathered together with you and agreed to help one another and protect each other from outsiders who might seek to do harm to you or your properties, you would be a government, albeit a small one.

And I’m not saying we could or even should do away with current governments in the world tomorrow - even if we could. We would need 50-100 years or more to slowly wittle away these systems so that free people can take their place.

So to answer your question specifically, I don’t think it has anything to do with anarchists and everything to do with logic. If it is not OK for your neighbor John to do to you what I outlined above, then it isn’t OK for Tom to do it if Tom is a representative of the “government”. There is no such thing as saying you can rape someone because a group of people got together and decided what you decide is right is legitimate and therefore, it isn’t even rape.

The mere fact that your neighbor doing what the government does would be even legally classified as theft but when the government does it it’s not called by that same word should be a gargantuan red flag. Only the politicians and political manipulate language in that way. The honest of us just call it what it actually is - theft.

If I own something and you want it and I do not want to give it to you and you take it, that is theft. It doesn’t matter who does it or what “group” they are affiliated to. You don’t get to steal and then try and say it isn’t theft because your version is “legitimate”.

Like what, exactly?

Like roads? Police? Schools? How’s about grocery stores?

Let’s talk about grocery stores. Government in the US does not “do” grocery stories. The free market does (I say free with a bit of a grain of salt, of course.)

And there are no problems with food in this country. In fact, we live in a country of such overabundance of food that we have foodstuffs coming in the world over, and throw away roughly 65 billion tons - TONS, annually and have a weight epidemic.

The market is SO GOOD at food that it creates overabundance issues. Everywhere you look, food is available. I have like 20 grocery stores near me. I can get most of them to deliver right to my door. There are restaurants, fast food chains, diners, food in gas stations and rest stops, at kiosks, airports, on flights, at hotels, parks, on mobile trucks, and so much more.

Any argument you might propose could fundamentally be explained, at least at a high-level, by showcasing this concept. The government COULD have done food and then we would be having this same conversation, but you might say, “if there is no government, then we will all starve! Who will do food?”

But the government does not do food and I bet you if they did, we would have fewer options, food would be of lower quality, and food would cost more than it does today. Everything, and I will reiterate that - EVERYTHING the government does it does worse than the market can do.

Shipping? The U.S. Postal Service typically hemorrhages between 6.5 and 9.5 billion annually, and it has a MONOPOLY on certain aspects of shipping. FedEx and UPS on the other hand? They generate collectively over 180 billion in annual revenue. BOTH are on the fortune 500 list.

And how could we ever get all of these Amazon shipments without the government? Oh, wait, they don’t ship those either. Amazon sends shipments more accurately, with less waste, quicker, AND CHEAPER than USPS does, hands down, and it isn’t even a primary shipping company!

Or what about police? Security? Do rich people use police, or private security? Well of course they buy private security, but you and I can’t afford private security, so we rely on the police showing up after we’ve already been robbed, whereas the rich - in their gated communities - have mobile security keeping a constant watch for them.

But why is private security so expensive? Well, because the government regulates it so firmly. They want to be a monopoly on policing and security.

Same goes for education. Where do the rich send their kids? Public school? No? Private? Well of course they do!

Obama went to Punahou, a private college-prep school in Honolulu, and Biden too, went to a private Catholic high school - Archmere Academy. So why can’t we send our kids to these better schools? Oh that’s right, cost.

So why can’t Jeff Bezos just create Amazon Academics, and provide higher quality education at a lower cost than the governmental-run public schools? Well, because of government regulation, of course!

Imagine I was a millionaire and I wanted to invest in starting a business of educating K-12 students. Maybe I have a goal of setting down in a minority, impoverished area and providing high-quality education at a low price. How do I do this if the competition school that runs on stolen funding (taxes) doesn’t close down no matter how poorly they do?

In one of Chicago’s lowest-performing high schools for instance, the dropout rate reaches 36% (3% is the average across the rest of the state.) So what if I could create an educational program there with a dropout rate of say, 13%? TWICE as superior simply based around that single statistic.

Well it wouldn’t be possible because the government self-subsidizes without producing anything of value. I, as owner of a business, would need to produce value to consumers who want to pay for my services, but the government mandates your kids go to public school (especially if you can’t afford anything better), then sets all sorts of rules and regulations on me that itself doesn’t even have to follow, and can change whenever it wants!

Imagine I had to create 10 units of value in my school to produce the output for my goals. Imagine now that this other school produces 5 units of value. Nobody would send their kids to the 5 unit school, and it would go out of business - if this were the market we’re talking about.

But the state can just continue forcing you to use their school and take your money to pay for its failure, and I’m forced to charge you too much for you to send your kids to my school because of government restrictions and the fact that their school even exists in the first place.

I PROMISE YOU that if government education was weened out across the next 50-100 years and the private sector came in to fill in the gaps, education would improve dramatically and the cost would go down, not up.

Government is fundamentally always the problem because all the government is is a big gun everyone is arguing over (which is what politics is) who gets to wield.

My proposition is that there shouldn’t even BE an argument over who gets to wield the gun. The ONLY rational purpose of the gun is to stop people from murdering, raping, robbing, and defrauding, assaulting, etc. That’s it.

Just because I didn’t type out a 30 page dissertation does not mean my ideas are inchoate. You sound like quite a pompous and arrogant person.

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Everyone is getting so close to the correct answer to the correct problem with all of this illegal immigration stuff. I’ll explain the problem and solution.

The problem - people say, is that people with different ideas from our own can come into a given government and vote to change the rules. The solution then is that illegal immigration is bad.

The true problem is that there is a given government where you can vote to control other people at all. Do away with that and you did away with the problem. Then anyone can live anywhere they like so long as they do so without violating the will of others (not murdering, stealing, raping, or defrauding.)

Governments are and have always been the actual problem. This isn’t complicated.

Look, you can live next door to me so long as you bought my neighbors house with their consent. If you try to attack me or my family in any way, I will defend myself. If you think my not believing in Allah is bad and you want to kill me, I will kill you in self defense. If you think it is bad but won’t attack me and my family, we can coexist.

The problem is that if you can come here and usurp an already evil and corrupt system (all governments are this) and use that system to create a law saying that I should be killed because I do not believe in Allah, thus sending government thugs to my home to carry out that deed, that is a massive problem and the culprit is not only you for being evil, but the government for existing in a state in which an evil person can contribute to an evil act of such magnitude, through the hand of the state.

This isn’t complicated.

The mere aspect of voting for a ruling class is sinister.

I’ve actually fought my entire life against the “game” of business. I don’t like the lingo, I don’t like the corporate nonsense, and I don’t like how business in general is conducted. I mostly work by myself. I’ve simply learned some skills that let me produce value for businesses so they want to give me a paycheck, but even then it’s always an ongoing challenge because anyone can be removed from a role at any time and for any reason.

I work high up in large business, so I know how it works.

Let’s say you’re correct, so what? Let’s say I have $10,000 to invest. I notice that the electronics sector is a good place to invest based upon recent trends, so I want to invest there. I do some research and conclude I will either invest in Apple, or Samsung.

If I choose Apple and they give me a 5% return on investment but Samsung gives me 8%, I will invest with Samsung. My money isn’t a charity, it’s an investment.

I am relying on the company to do the best job that they can to provide me with a return on my investment because I would actually LOSE money on my investment, and if I keep losing money, that would be quite irrational of me to keep investing, wouldn’t it?

And if Samsung ends up getting 70% of the investment and Apple only 30%, Apple is going to go out of business, and it should. This would fundamentally mean that Samsung is the superior business in that sector and Apple is doing so poorly that it should not exist.

Investors by the way do not obtain a fixed percentage of profit from a company’s income statement. What they receive depends on a myriad of things like earnings through dividends, equity appreciation, interest rates, type of investments, etc.

Publicly traded companies have benefits over private. They for instance, can produce large amounts of money through selling stock or bond issuing, and shareholders being able to easily buy/sell shares gives good data on company value. Private businesses on the other hand often have more limit on raising funds, so it can make it very challenging, if not impossible, for private companies in some sectors to compete with publicly traded ones. Keep in mind it’s also more complicated than that.

I can give you an example from my business life as well. About 5 years ago a mid-market business (let’s just say around 5 billion in annual revenue) was bought by a private equity firm. The reason was the business was failing. If not for private equity, the business likely would have died.

Through private equity and their investor base, the business is still afloat and doing even better. Private equity was able to invest in the business to make it more profitable, but they don’t want to do that with nothing to gain. The goal in that investment is they make enough of a return in the future that they made a profit off the endeavor. It’s a risk - the firm could have invested billions only to see nothing but a loss. Do that too often and the entire firm would fail and thus, close.

A lot of terminations were done too, but new people were also brought in and a lot of changes were made.

But without giving to that investment, the business would have failed and 100% of its employees would have been without a job. This business currently employs over 10,000 people, mind you.

But at the end of the day you can refuse to work for an employer and they run the risk of going out of business.

How do you become rich legally and morally if you cannot hire any staff because you’re being selfish?

You do understand right, that this is all our responsibility in a free society? Granted, no society in today’s age (or ever) has truly been free. We run a mixture of freedom and tyranny and we’re not wholly a free market but a partially controlled one, but if we WERE a free market then if say, McDonald’s suddenly stopped paying their employees, you could just opt to stop buying McDonald’s and they would go out of business. It actually is that simple.

I have stopped shopping with entire companies due to my principles. I for example will not buy Apple products because I do not agree with their business. Apple isn’t about to go out of business anytime soon from that, but that’s not because of me, that’s because of other people. If the overarching society is too stupid to be responsible enough to make good choices and the downstream effects are bad for them, that’s kinda just too bad.

You can either be free and responsible, or irresponsible and governed. There’s no third option. Are you an adult, or a child? That’s about what it is.

Gas prices should have nothing to do with governments, only markets. Gas prices being high is a byproduct of government interventions, or poor market choices, or both.

I’ve worked as a cashier many times in my life. I would not say that my perspective is privileged.

That said, I will continue to argue that it is antiquated. I’m talking about from the perspective of the business as well, mind you. The notion that we have to pay someone who stands at a register for X number of hours Y salary per hour is antiquated. There are so many other ways to handle that kind of trade for labor. Per person who goes through your line, for example, or just salary.

The problem is though that like it or not, the kind of people (this is a generality, mind you) who end up working a cash register for any length of time don’t often have the same kind of mentality to hold the ability to provide high value to a business. If your biggest value is your ability to scan items, there isn’t a position I can hire you for in my structure where I can’t find simply far too many others with more experience and skill who will provide more value. It goes back to, can you push that boulder up the hill in 4 hours, or does it take you 8? I don’t want to hire two people who it takes 8, I want to hire 1 that can do what both of you can do combined. The fact that you have to compete with that other person isn’t unfair, it’s just rational.

I used to work for an internet retailer where we had this thing happen that we called the 50/50/50 rule. Every year we would hire a bunch of warehouse workers. The company even invested in a bussing system that would drive these individuals to and from work every day and the pay was very fair for a warehouse role of this caliber. Everyone we interviewed had to take two tests. The first test was a VERY simple math and reading test. We’re talking adding and subtracting of 2 digit numbers and basic multiplication and division and simple reading. The second was a more complex test but I’d have placed it around an 8th grade level, at most. Of those we interviewed, 50% failed the first test, of those that passed that, 50% failed the second, and of those who did not, 50% didn’t show up to work the first day.

Keep in mind I took the tests and scored 100% on both and this was before I ever went to college.

Like it or not, there ARE calibers of people in this world. We want to think of everyone as equal, but they’re just not. Everyone should be treated equally under the law, but that doesn’t make them equal. If you are someone who cannot pass a simple math and reading test, and by simple I mean like 2nd grade stuff here, then I can’t hire you - not for the simplest job we have a need for.

There’s a firm point with what I’m saying here: Many businesses find that it makes more sense to pay hourly to a casher because if not, the casher is a lot more likely to not show up for work, not do their job when they do, and not do it correctly when they do their job than someone in my field. Same with the kinds of people who applied during my anecdotal warehouse example. Police were called every week due to fights and illicit drug use as well.

Again, there simply ARE calibers of people and there’s nothing you’re going to do about that. If that’s not you and you work at a register all day, then I’ve confidence you won’t be for long and maybe that antiquated way of trading for your labor will change, as it should.

Freedom of association is both moral and good.

This isn’t quite how it works. Generally in medium to large businesses - meaning at least a billion a year in annual revenue - oftentimes how it works is a given business unit (BU) will be given a budget. This is usually based on analysis and projections based on the previous fiscal years as well as projections on growth goals.

The VP of that BU will need to spread that budget across their unit as best they can. This will include everything from promotions to new hires. Keep in mind that it could cost a business $160 an hour to hire one full time employee who only makes $50 an hour, all things depending. In many roles, it can take a year or more to get a new hire up to speed in their new role. At $160 an hour, that’s $332,800 against your budget and that first year will not recoup 100% of the potential output of that new hire who will likely not be putting out their fullest until around a year or more, so you’re looking at what more or less accounts to over a quarter of a million just to train a new employee for one year so they can start putting out the same level of work as someone of their level should be.

Then consider if you’re an international company. The business I work for for example is in 60 different countries. All of those countries have different regulatory practices that require a lot out of the HR business unit(s). Some countries have regulatory requirements that force the business to utilize software that can account for those regulations that cost millions annually and aren’t even very good, but there isn’t a good alternative, so it’s either pay that or fall out of compliance, which is not really a viable strategy.

If you have 100 employees in your unit and you want to give them all a 3% annual raise but you’re not given a larger budget unless you grow that side of the business (in other words, you self fund), then where are you getting that revenue stream from?

In many cases you have to set up projects yourself from the top-down, such as requesting from your directors that they begin brainstorming ways to generate revenue. This could be through efficiencies, for example. If you were a director in HR for example, maybe you want to take a look at your team’s processes and see what could be automated. That project alone requires expertise, and those kinds of analysts aren’t cheap. Then you need engineers to perform the automation, which are also not cheap, and you need a surefire return on investment there because the end goal might be to free up 25% of your team’s labor through automation of their current processes, but you may not see a return on investment for 2 years, then by the third year the return isn’t even enough to hire an additional 3 people, let alone give an entire team of 100 a 3% raise.

So you might argue then, “well why can’t the business just give that BU a larger budget?” And there are a few answers. I won’t list them all here, but some examples would be is there something your team could be doing to increase their value to warrant taking budget from elsewhere to funnel into your team? Or every year is it just expected that 3% of the budget go into the employees without an ounce of those employees providing any additional value? To seriously simplify, if the business makes $100 and they pay $50 to their employees and $30 to their shareholders and $20 is reinvested in the company, why should the business pay the employees 60%? HOW do they pay them 60%? They have to take it from the shareholders or the reinvestment, and take too much from the reinvestment and your competition will put you out of business, and take too much from the shareholders and they will invest with your competitors - see the problem?

Many employees don’t understand that they have to increase their perceived value to warrant more, and few do.

I would argue that you’re not thinking about working hours at a high enough level. The notion that someone can tell you that the negotiation for labor exchange is hourly is just simplifying the negotiation. For example, I make $70 an hour after you calculate it annually, but I’m not an hourly employee. I also work from home, which is a net positive because I’m a more laborious worker when I do this which is a benefit to the employer, and it’s a stress reducer for me, which is a benefit to me, the employee.

But there’s a secondary aspect of this situation which is that I do not have someone else “watching” me and making sure I’m working all the time. That concept is antiquated. It isn’t that there’s X amount of hours of work to do in a day, it’s that there’s Y amount of labor that needs to be done, but we don’t know what that Y variable is. We fundamentally understand the overarching goal - it might be something like, how can we increase efficiency? But it’s a problem solving concept where we need to utilize time (labor) to think up strategies to how we can solve that problem while connecting objective information to those strategies so we can better understand how they can even be implemented.

After all, if I can increase my own efficiency by 5% but doing so requires 6 months of my time, that isn’t going to have a payoff for many years and is likely not in the best interest of either myself or the business.

In addition, working more hours doesn’t correlate to more work getting done. One man might push a boulder up a hill in 8 hours while another might be able to do it in 6, or even 4. Do you want to pay them both the same amount? Would you want to be paid the same amount if you were the man pushing the boulder in 4 hours as the man pushing in 8? Of course not.

And do you always receive additional reward each time your labor correlates to some kind of improvement? Well no, of course not. Sometimes you do, and sometimes you can go years without seeing anything outside of your salary. The reason is simply because life and human relationships and interactions are complicated and there’s a lot more going on than you’re going to give credit for.

I make a decent income, but I also have to prove my value to my company. What I do can be in no small part measured, so if I’m not producing value, the business won’t want to keep me on the payroll, and if someone cheaper - thus, less credentialed/experienced - can do much of, or even all of the value I can provide, they will just swap me out for that person, and rightly so. Wouldn’t you leave a company who’s only paying you $40 an hour for work that another would pay you $70 for?

Most of the people complaining about why we still have to work so much isn’t seeing the bigger picture, and likely works a shitty job where the average employee needs to be monitored and probably doesn’t have the expertise to be doing anything that isn’t more or less transactional (meaning, you are asked to specifically perform very informed tasks like on a conveyor line). This is just a byproduct of people without high-level modern skills complaining that they’re sick of pushing boulders up hills all day every day.

I mean, I haven’t pushed boulders up hills for 20 years.