Do you make median income or less? (For a full-time worker, that's about 41,000/yr.)

I think most of HN is in the "baronet" class (say, 2-3x of median income) or higher, and doesn't necessarily have a good perspective on what most people (ie, those at or below median income) deal with.

Per capita income has flatlined for a decade (since 2008), after 60 years of steady growth. But that largely doesn't impact programmers, entrepreneurs, etc. Instead, it impacts the people on the bottom.

Just because the present system works for you doesn't mean it works for everyone.

It was always good to be king.

Vast majority of people are in jobs they didn't want getting paid very little. Many are working several jobs. This is all by design of corrupt politicians and self-serving elites in business who have forced higher productivity, cut jobs, and shifted almost all rewards to least-productive people on top. Usually barely-skilled, biased managers are deciding who gets hired, how they're treated, and why they're fired. This is often related to politics more than job performance.

So, overall, it looks more like a form of economic slavery than some cooperative, voluntary, win-win system. A good hint is that most of the wealth has moved into few hands who usually didn't work their way up into it from the bottom like the people producing it. The people producing it didn't want that arrangement either. They have no control, though, since the elites outspend all of them combined on politicians passing these laws, media shaping perspectives, and public education limiting their intellectual growth while simultaneously reinforcing submission to authority (esp arbitrary requirements) daily for 12+ years. Most of America is born into a new form of slavery that few ever escape.

> [..] since the elites outspend all of them combined on politicians [..]

"[the illusion of]"Democracy", "Organized religions", "history of our society", esp. the last 300 years or so", 3 of the most profitable lies in todays day and age. Its wrong to say that this "happens to be happening because A, B .. Z", this is "works-as-designed". A world viewed from the top has no nations, only powerful blood-lines, it has not morals only self interest, it has no humanity only contempt of the "human animals" they have inherited and extended control over. It's them, a new species, and us, the soon-to-be transformed, stripped of everything that could challenge them, rest of the world.

This is insightful. One test we can apply is to ask ourselves, "If I needed to stop working and quit my job permanently because <put compelling reason here, e.g. illness, old age>, could I do so without enduring a financial disaster leading to <something horrible, e.g. homelessness, relying on the kindness of strangers, suicide>?"

I suspect that, for many, if not most of us, the loss of the ability to earn income would be an unspeakably grave event. This puts to the lie that we have any real choice about employment, assuming we are one of the vast majority of people who is not financially independent.

> Calling a situation in which an employer trades you money for your time and effort "slave labor" is a disgusting metaphor and an affront to actual slaves

Incorrect. Throughout history there has been many societies where people would legally sell themselves into slavery (e.g. to pay a debt, under threat of being imprisoned) and even receive a meager salary.

Yet it's still slavery; you can look up the definition in a dictionary.

If you wouldn't [work for a "slave-master"] you'd end up homeless on the street, no option to enter university, change your qualification, travel and get some experience abroad, start a business, nothing, absolutely 0 social mobility. Todays slavery does not need chains, it only needs ideology "on the west"(of which direct application you are a great example of), and an unprecedented murderous machine abroad(which you have no idea about, not the slightest)