To be clear, are you saying that the hypothetical farmer "me" in the story is being unjust and exploitative for hiring the combine? Or are you just accusing the societal system, not the hypothetical me, of being unjust and exploitative?
I ask this because I think you are actually getting at the point I was trying to make.
Re:Amazon's German Workers Strike
by jjoonathan on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @02:30AM
(#6926319)
Yes, I'm accusing the societal system (which presents you with two exploitative alternatives), not you. I think we do fundamentally agree and that the confusion might have stemmed from the fact that I answered a question which I thought you were implying rather than your literal question.
You asked "The current system gives choices X,Y. Isn't X>Y?" and I ignored the "Isn't X>Y?" part because I assumed it was mostly a rhetorical device designed to make concrete the first part ("The current system gives choices X,Y") which was more relevant to the philosophical issue being discussed.
My answer was "Yeah, it sucks that X,Y are our choices, because I think that one of M,N,O, or P might be better."
The big problem with the market is that it forces us to choose between the two. It snatches defeat from the jaws of victory by coupling the "workers starve" outcome to the "workers don't have jobs" outcome. There is no fundamental reason why they need to be coupled. Just because only 80% of people have to work to meet demand doesn't mean the other 20% deserve to starve.
Many systems are possible in which marginal incentives are maintained (the farmer and tractor driver get significantly more money than the out-of-work laborers) but the laborers don't go hungry. I search for my favorite solution among these (I'm a big fan of basic income / negative income tax).
As you note, we are automating away more and more of our economy every day. If we keep our current course, such automation becomes a club used by those who have enabled the automation (or otherwise accumulated capital) to beat down those who have not. I think that's a terrifying idea that at best leads to terrible injustice and at worst leads to violent overthrow of its perpetrators (including myself). We need an economic model that maintains the dignity of the labor force even in the face of shrinking demand for labor.