They are not at a disadvantage. Whether the job seeker is dealing with a small business looking to hire someone, or a large corporation looking to hire someone, they have the same power to walk away if the job offerer doesn't offer the best terms on the market.
It's as simple as that. You're getting stuck on some trope about "imbalance of power" and are not dealing with the simple reality that in a free market, the only power someone has over another is to offer them a better deal than the next best offer on the market.
That is not exploitation, or abuse or anything else that we need to violate the freedom of contract for.
>>There are crimes that don't involve the violation of anyone's rights.
Nothing that doesn't involve the violation of anyone's rights should be a crime.
>>You're arguing for the ability to sign legal protections away.
Yes I'm arguing that people should be free to make their judgments on what offer to accept. We don't need to deny people the right to offer terms because we assume that others lack the judgment to decide for themselves whether those terms are in their interest.
>>Then provide a more direct solution.
I did: provide more resources for legal representation for less-resourced parties.
>>This is a start, but doesn't address the potential loss of livelyhood.
It does, because a strong enough case of contract violation will allow legal firms to pay the wronged party living costs on the expectation that the defendant will need to cover those costs at a later date.
>>It also doesn't address the potential for abuse at the contract negotiation process.
And your solution doesn't address the vast swathes of mutually beneficial contracts that are prohibited by your cookie-cutter restrictions.
Problems should be addressed on a case-by-case basis, through court proceedings that weigh the facts of each case. Cookie cutter rules that generalize entire classes of ostensibly mutually voluntary interactions as "involuntary", based on ridiculuos equations like "unequal power leads to unfair contracts" are not justice. They are not good government. They are not reasonable laws.
>> some form of basic income
No thank you. No universal welfare extracted through pain of imprisonment from those producing value.
>>And yet I just gave a laundry list of counterexamples.
I refuted every one of your examples.
>>Repeating utterly untrue statements doesn't lend them more legitimacy, it just makes you look out of touch. Which, to be clear, you are.
Any reasonable person would view a third party forcibly interfering and preventing a mutually voluntary interaction between two consenting adults as patronizing, and totalitarian. That's a fact that's clear once you strip away political partisanship, appeals to legality and ideological rationalizations.
You're just in denial that the ideology you bet the farm on is, like all ideologies, wrong.
>>Your proposed system would allow people to sign themselves into slavery.
No. No court would allow that under common law. A court would find an argument that what a person agreed to a decade earlier cannot bind the person they are in the present, because the two people are not in effect the same person, as reasonable.
Like I said: arguing with libertarians and showing how naive and simplistic their assumptions are is sport for intellectual types in the US. You're a typical example of that.
So you're saying that a blanket rule to make contracts that involve selling ones-self into slavery makes sense? Or that there are certain circumstances in which selling oneself into slavery is alright, and so it should be adjudicated by the court on a case by case basis?
How even could someone who is a slave (and therefore likely limited in their movements) petition a court?
> A court would find an argument that what a person agreed to a decade earlier cannot bind the person they are in the present
People sign contracts for more than 10 years all the time (mortgages, as an example). You saying we can just back out of those?
If courts rule that selling oneself into slavery is in all circumstances non-consensual, then there's no problem at all with codifying that with a statute. This would never be the case with minimum wage or 'fair' housing laws.
Courts would absolutely find numerous if not almost all instances of such interactions as consensual.
>>How even could someone who is a slave (and therefore likely limited in their movements) petition a court?
The slavery is a private relationship, not one that is relevant to the court. The government doesn't deperson someone just because they enter into a slavery agreement with another party. The court would accept petitions from all legal persons.
>>People sign contracts for more than 10 years all the time (mortgages, as an example). You saying we can just back out of those?
Mortgage contracts govern property, not people. One has a right to give property away. One doesn't have a right to give their future self away.
This contradicts what you said earlier, which is that you should be able to sign away legal protections in a contact.
It seems we agree on one point: there are some rights you cannot sign away, and it is the government's responsibility to intervene in such a situation. You draw that line at somewhere around slavery. I simply draw the line elsewhere.
We're both willing to violate your previously involiable right to contract. If you truly believed it were involiable, you would respect a person's right to sign themselves into slavery or indentured servitude. There are situations where one might be willing to make such a decision: to save a loved one, perhaps.
But you've said that such a contract could be voided, even if at the time of signing the parties consented.
We both agree that there should be limits on the right to contract, much as there are limits on most other rights. I simply claim that the line should be drawn differently than where you believe it should be.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to sign away "legal protections", which is a vague term that has a very subjective meaning based on one's perspective on a particular contract.
I said that one shouldn't be able to sign away someone else's rights. I think a court would find that selling one's future self into slavery falls into this category.
You can't just blur the distinction between these two very different things and claim that I'm indirectly supporting one by supporting the other.
>>We're both willing to violate your previously involiable right to contract.
The right to contract doesn't need to be violated to end selling one's self into slavery. All that needs to happen is that a court find that in the future self is not the same person as the present self.
Unlike you I want these determinations to be made by courts of law not by very ill-informed and ideologically motivated social activists who are not carefully weighing the evidence of each case.
Claiming that selling ones self into slavery and accepting a lease agreement that says the property owner is not obligated to keep renting to you at the same price after 1 year are equally easy to make a blanket judgment about not being consensual, is disingenous.
And with regard to the very extreme scenario of the former; I'm not even saying we should make a blanket judgment about that at the legislative level. I'm saying that the courts should judge that and only if they determine that all cases of this situation are non-consensual, should a law be made to ban it.
So we have very differing views on this, despite the superficial similarities you pointed out, and which are only similarities when viewed out of context.
>>We both agree that there should be limits on the right to contract
Wrong, the right to contract does not allow violating other people's rights. Violating someone else's rights is non-contractual. I oppose an agreement to sell oneself into slavery only insofar as a court after careful and considered deliberations has determined that it is a violation of a party's rights, and thus not a fully consensual/contractual interaction.
You are not willing to make that leap and say that only courts should be making these determinations because only courts do the deliberation needed to competently judge these very complex matters. Because if you did make that leap then you would have to admit that you're a Libertarian and that left-wing ideology does not work. And you are not willing to do that.
In other words, your proposed legal system would prevent someone from signing over some rights to their future self. Your ethical reasoning behind this choice is irrelevant. The mechanics of your proposed laws would make certain contracts void.
As I've said before, courts cannot make decisions in a vacuum. They need laws to rule based on. The laws that would need to exist to enable the system you want in practice restrict the freedom to contract that you claim to leave unrestricted.
You try to avoid this contradiction by wrapping it up in the idea that you can be a different person in ten years, but current laws don't recognize that, and the only reason you'd need such a law is to resolve this contradiction without explicitly limiting the contract. It's transparent. I expect I could find more contradictions, but you'd similarly attempt special pleading for those cases.
No, that is not how common law works. Common law holds consent as a core principle of contract law. Courts take all manner of factors into consideration in determining whether parties gave consent.
Courts will most certainly consider the genuity of the consent a person gave 10 years prior to being foribly confined and made to labor for another.
You're using ideologically extremism and bigotry with your "free man of the land" nonsense accusation, which is intended to belittle and delegitimize me, and avoid contending with my point on its own merits.
>>They need laws to rule based on.
That is not how commom law works. Commom law is based on existing statutes and legal precedent. In the absence of the former, the latter suffices. Contract law in particular is based almost exclusively on common law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent
>>You try to avoid this contradiction by wrapping it up in the idea that you can be a different person in ten years, but current laws don't recognize that
The argument has never been tested in court. I'm suggesting the argument would be accepted by a court, and you've provided no reason to believe it wouldn't.
> Courts will most certainly consider the genuity of the consent a person gave 10 years prior to being foribly confined and made to labor for another.
In the hypothetical, we've already agreed that the consent given was genuine. The question isn't whether or not the consent was genuine, the answer to that is a resounding "yes". The question is "is the person now, 10 years later, a different person such that their prior genuine consent no longer applies"? This question can be rephrased as "Is there a way to re-invent myself as a new legal being and avoid prior obligations and agreements at no consequence to myself?" They are in fact the same question. And courts time and time again have resoundingly answered that question with a no. A group that consistently tries to argue otherwise is freemen of the land. Hence me throwing you in with them, because you're using their (nonsense) arguments. Thankfully we've seen them try those arguments in court before, and they never win.
> I'm suggesting the argument would be accepted by a court, and you've provided no reason to believe it wouldn't.
Let me just repeat that last bit: these arguments have been tried, by the freemen of the land whose comparison you so resent. They never win. Courts have tested and failed these arguments because they are bad arguments.
>>The question isn't whether or not the consent was genuine, the answer to that is a resounding "yes". The question is "is the person now, 10 years later, a different person such that their prior genuine consent no longer applies"
That goes to the question of whethee the consent was genuine. Consent is not genuine when it is provided on behalf of another party.
>>This question can be rephrased as "Is there a way to re-invent myself as a new legal being and avoid prior obligations and agreements at no consequence to myself?"
A disingenuous leading construction of the question..
And being considered a different person does not allow one to avoid all obligations and agreements that their pass self entered into. All property bounded by past agreements would still be bound, and the vast majority of agreements use property as collateral to compel compliance.
Only self-imposed slavery would be nullified by such an affirmative response to the question.
This has nothing to do with your "freemen-of-the-land" nonsense accusation.
I'd be open to seeing a single court case where someone used the "they are not their past self" argument to get out of their legal obligations.
This doesn't address the imbalance of power between the job seeker and the job provider. The job seeker is still at a disadvantage in the relationship. We're talking externalities, not the efficiency of supply and demand in a perfectly efficient market. I reject the notion that such a market exists.
> Any contract formed toward that end is an act toward a commission of a violation of someone's rights, and thus appropriately prohibited.
There are crimes that don't involve the violation of anyone's rights. Such contracts should still be invalid.
> If the less powerful party provides genuine consent to such a provision, then it's no one else's business. They agreed to those circumstances.
And are now unable to seek retribution for additional damages. You're arguing for the ability to sign legal protections away.
> Blanket judgements based on crude generalization are not directly addressing the issue of less resourced parties being at a disadvantage in legal battles.
Then provide a more direct solution.
> The issue is the legal disadvantage that less resourced parties face, which has to be addressed by more resources going towards legal representation for less resourced parties.
This is a start, but doesn't address the potential loss of livelyhood. It also doesn't address the potential for abuse at the contract negotiation process. If you're going to propose something like everyone getting free, government provided legal aid and some form of basic income, sure that might address all of my issues, but I have a feeling you wouldn't appreciate the taxes required to maintain such a system.
> I think anyone who's grown up with Western ideals would consider a third party interfering with a consensual interaction between two adults to be a totalitarian imposition that infantilizes and patronizes one or both counter-parties.
And yet I just gave a laundry list of counterexamples. Repeating utterly untrue statements doesn't lend them more legitimacy, it just makes you look out of touch. Which, to be clear, you are.
The US is, compared to most of the western world, far more anti-union, and anti-union ideology is more pervasive here than in most western nations. The right to act without government intervention to the extent you hold it is a fringe view, and is not something that most people support. And there's good reason for that:
> Just like slavery didn't violate anyone's rights 300 years?
> If the less powerful party provides genuine consent to such a provision, then it's no one else's business. They agreed to those circumstances.
Your proposed system would allow people to sign themselves into slavery. Stop trying to argue that slavery was some unjust evil, when you're simultaneously arguing for a system that would allow slavery. You can't have it both ways. Either slavery (or perhaps indentured servitude, since that was often consensual) didn't violate people's rights back in the day, or your proposed legal framework, which would allow people to sign themselves over as slaves, would! Which is it?