I say this because it creates an incentive to move with the herd. Only economic shifts that effect a large class of people will ever see bailouts. This means that it's safer to to do something that a lot of people do, like drive a taxi, than to do something more exotic, like opening a pastry shop. If you drive a taxi and some large corporation deploys a fleet of self driving taxis in your city, then you have a chance of a bailout because there would be enough people affeced to make it worth legislators' time. If some starts delivering oven-hot 3d-printed pastries by drone, then there's not enough pastry shop owners for legislators to address it. That's not fair to the pastry shop owners, and it makes it less attractive to open a pastry shop.
If you want to avoid destroying lives and families when major innovation occurs (or in other circumstances) then it has to be via means that are available to everyone. Proposed systems like basic income or negative income tax make the loss of a job less damaging, but are not without their downfalls. Similar with traditional liberal welfare programs.
Slaves no but being forced in to productive jobs is the whole point of tying income to market demands. A force which effects us all not just taxi drivers.
>The deserve some help
Sure. Financial aid to reskill. Unemployment benefits while they job hunt. Hell, as I said, I'm for a basic income presuming I get to not work alongside the ex-taxi drivers. Help doesn't need to come in the form of specific regulations to allow a minority of people to perform unwanted work in exchange for income.
“There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.”
Don't equivocate on the word "force". If you get the government to make people do things, that's force. If people aren't giving you money they are not "forcing" you to work for your money.
Is my grocer forcing me to work for money when they demand payment for the food I want to eat?
The slave metaphor makes no sense: slaves have a master who cares for his investment. Free people have none and must care for and provide for themselves. To assume they cannot is degrading.
The world does not care if one is comfortable or not. We humans, on the other hand, do. Given our level of economic output the question is ethical and political, not ontological.
The reason people don't do this is that as wealth has increased, being a wage slave or welfare queen (the modern equivalent seems to be disability fraud king) has become vastly more attractive.
Sure. Participating in the economy gives you access to the things this economy produces, which in the last century started to be really pretty cool. Why people don't move? I suspect that by the time people get in a bad enough situation to consider a move, they can no longer afford it. Secondly, trapping rabbits and waving your own cloth are both specialist, learned skills, which in the past were taught to the children as they grew. Again, for a typical westerner desperate enough to go primal, a city is much better bet than a wilderness - in cities, high-quality safe food tends to be concentrated in well-marked areas, and it's easier to get access to it than to hunt down an animal.
They are slaves, but not ours. Look at taxi drivers - they belong to unions and license owners. Those, in turn, have local governments as their masters - government protects their monopoly in exchange for fee/favours. The whole arrangement looks like old good slavery - drivers do not starve, accept current order and have no incentive to change anything. Now, here comes Uber! You would imagine that taxi drivers would jump at the opportunity to become their own boss, but ironically they became the most vicious defenders of current corrupt system, where their place is strictly at the bottom.
You have it backwards.
Humans have always had to suck it up because this is the default, natural state. But one would think in XXI century we could do better. That we can show some civilization, some compassion, instead of telling the unfortunate among us that they should suck it up. They're not our slaves to be forced into productive jobs, or resources to be used up and discarded. They're human beings - with dreams, fears and hopes. The deserve some help, or at least, some consideration.
(Not to mention, the next day it may be us who will need the same.)
EDIT: changed to sound less personal - it wasn't my intention for it to sound like it was aimed at the OP.