Reply #140: Not Really, Sir [View All]

[The Magistrate]

In your No. 120 above, you introduced a line that, pressed to its logical conclusion, argues for slavery as a mode of employment.

Follow the lines of "The VALUE of their labor is determined by whether or not they can be replaced easily" and "Those "many persons" are paid that which their labor is worth to the person who gets to decide that (the employer/investor/etc), and things are then even. Any revenue that the enterprise generates above that is at the disposal of said person," and you have, as mentioned in my reply to those comments, the root arguments for exploitation at the limit of the will and capability of the employer to do so, and there is no essential difference between this and slavery, as a practical issue in a social system.

The idea you cling to, that what an employer chooses to pay for labor, or more to the point, can by hook or crook contrive to acquire the produce of labor for, is what that labor is worth, to the employer or to the laborer, is not a supportable one, and is a very pernicious one in practice. Labor at some task is worth what can be got for the product of that labor, less the cost of whatever the raw materials labored on amounted to. The aim of the employer is to get that labor at a price less than the value it brings to him by its exercise: this difference is profit. The fact that the laborer is never in a position to get the whole worth of his or her labor does not alter this. The fact is that the market is, in this instance, a rigged one. No employer will ever give what the work is worth; the entire system depends on this being so for its operation.




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