What is real, is the necessity of a human population to procreate. This need has two aspects: does culture in general support procreation and who's procreation does it support?
First, companies do not work in a vacuum of financial abstractions. Their operations are always rooted in a very fixed cultural context. This cultural context for the most part is the cultural context of the society where the operations are based. The corporate operations affect the cultural context outside and vice versa.
Now, the first part - should there be procreation? Unless the answer is yes we can stop the discussion right here.
As for the second part, who should procreate? Let's skip the eugenics part, but, the fact is this: talented kids are usually raised by talented parents.
Should the society become more talented? I'm certain this would serve everyones best interests. Well, then, if we accept without proof that talented individuals tend to work in corporations and demanding workplaces, then if those workplaces discourage the procreation of the talented individuals they discourage the population in general of benefitting from their statistically talented offspring.
This is what is on the table. Not the happy motherhood of a single mother, or the irritation of single coworkers who begrudge parents their perks, but the future of a society. From a statistical point of view. Human urges will make sure there are kids tomorrow as there are today but the way careers treat potential parents affect directly the total human potential of those kids.
Yes, and we have a concrete implementation of that abstraction in the law.
>What is real, is the necessity of a human population to procreate. This need has two aspects: does culture in general support procreation and who's procreation does it support?
I don't see any barriers to procreation here. All I see is people who want to have their cake and get other people to pay for it. Go ahead and have children, just like people have always done. But realize you're going to have to make some sacrifices, and that it's not reasonable to expect other people to make sacrifices on your behalf because you want to have children.
There are laws passed by legislators who are elected. The rule of law is established by force, not by any sort of contract or agreement. There is no social contract except in philosophy class and books that have no legal standing.
> "I don't get why employers should be forced to pay for someone's choice to have children."
Because
> "There are laws passed by legislators who are elected. The rule of law is established by force"
That's why. The men with the power, who control the men with the guns, have declared that this is the way our society should work. There is your realpolitik answer.
Obviously, in this case, that didn't happen or mindfulgeek wouldn't have been let go.
They are powerful, but not omnipotent. They are men, not gods.
- Was something illegal done here? - If yes, why is it (seemingly) so easy to do this? - How can this be changed? - Should it be changed? (In my opinion: Yes, a law which is easily breakable is useless)
Note: I only raise questions of legality here, not morality. I will not even start to discuss the morality of this action, because in my opinion anyone who says anything besides "horrible, not tolerable" in his analysis of what happened here has such a fundamental different set of core values from myself that any discussion would be a complete waste of time.
Laws don't exist to make it impossible to do the prohibited things, they exist to provide consequences for doing the prohibited things. Particularly, civil laws of this kind exist to provide compensation to those harmed by the act prohibited.
But they tend to require the person who believes they are due compensation to actively seek it.
U3 is a fanciful number, both because people are using disability insurance as a way to collect benefits indefinitely and because once you give up looking for a job you don't count as unemployed. The US has the lowest labor force participation rate in decades.
In terms of European countries there was an article about a week ago regarding Americans going to Germany for free college. The Germans were hoping they'd stay.
I think people worry about the quality of immigrants. We want more young Sergei Brins and fewer middle aged guys with a sixth grade education.
One could argue that saying that you're against illegal immigration and making legal immigration very difficult is the same as saying that you don't really want immigration.
Care for the elderly is still an intensive task. Maybe yes, in 30 years it will be done by (Japanese) robots but we're not close yet.
You have the economic burden too: how much more productive each working individual has to be if it has to offset an increased ration of non working individuals?
Lastly, I don't think a country is sustainable with a dwindling population unless it can be physically and culturally isolated and has an important deterrent against military action
Only Thomas Hobbe's take was based purely on force, because he viewed the nature of man as being vile and completely evil, which isn't surprising given the environment he lived in.
Incidentally, the U.S. government was set up in such a way where men were not beholden to others, but were equals, trading value for value with each other absent coercion. A strong but limited government was instituted to protect individual rights---to protect us against internal and external threats with retaliatory force.
The expansion of the government over the last 100 years has nothing to do with the protection of individual rights and the original intention of Founders (who were greatly influenced by Locke). The "social contract" is a way for some individuals to justify the abrogation of protecting the freedom of individuals in favor of a gargantuan rights-violating welfare state.
Finally, what is the objective measure of how much an individual owes? Do they owe 50% of their time? 70%? To whom specifically do they owe this? How does one come to these conclusions in an objective manner?
The U.S. government has supported taxation from day 1, including for the purposes of funding collective welfare, e.g. collective self-defense. Current citizens pay for the democratic decisions of past generations all the time. Even if you don't drive, you pay taxes to support road and bridge maintenance. This is not "indentured servitude". It is how a democratic society functions.
How much do we owe? Answer: it is determined through a democratic decision-making process that weighs costs and benefits to our society.
Case in point: This very forum would likely not exist without the aforementioned expansion of government. DARPA and government funding for high-tech research to the tune of billions of dollars has been instrumental in the birth and evolution of Silicon Valley, and continues today (e.g. Siri, self-driving cars).
If anything I think your "many other networks" example reinforces the point. The private sector left to its own devices came up with tons of incompatible small networks all vying to be the juggernaut.
The government, when faced with much larger problems than growing market share, instead invested considerable resources into solving a problem in a way that could handle the needs of a large national government, and then later invested more resources into making that internet a public good.
Even if the government hadn't developed its own internet protocols (and standardized on a notional private sector one), the government would likely still have been instrumental in expanding the use of some other standard. E.g. Eisenhower didn't invent the road, but his Administration sure did ensure a lot of them got built.
And they also built gateways so they could interface with each other. The pressure to connect them together was enormous.
For another example, Unicode isn't a government standard, and has replaced the various earlier competing protocols.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#History
The idea that the private sector won't standardize has plenty of counterexamples. Ethernet, for another.
Just like if the Wright Bros had not invented the airplane in 1903, someone else would have probably within 5 years. We'd still be flying today.
I suspect that the number of inventions that would not inevitably have happened once the preconditions were in place is very small.
After all, as I mentioned previously, having worked extensively with computers before the internet, the first thing someone with two computers tries to do is hook them together.
Hell, I even did my own hardware and software to transfer files from my LSI-11 to a PC over a wire. The government couldn't have stopped an internet workalike from forming if it tried.
This country was very specifically founded NOT as a democracy, for the very reason elucidated above. If the mob wants to vote your rights away, they should not be able to.
Self-defense and transfer payments from one individual to another (i.e., welfare) are different issues fundamentally. We authorize the government to solve the problem of coordination---in terms of defense, we don't want a bunch of private militaries roving around the countryside. At the heart of this is the issue of rights protection: if one man steals from another, his rights have been violated and government must act in response.
However, if the issue is whether a man has a claim on another man's property simple because he "needs" it, this is not sufficient justification for him to take it by force. Indeed, most people would call this "theft". Why is it different if the thug steals a dollar in dark alley from you or if a government coerces the same action at the point of a gun? Because a majority have voted for it?
Taxes are the bill you pay for living in a place where the government provides some services.
When I hear someone say "taxation is theft," I think, what a freeloader.
Even if we narrowly focus on a particular system of "private property right protection", which was certainly not the exclusive focus of the founding fathers -- who also advocated slavery and were extremely protectionist -- that nonetheless requires the enthusiastic embracement of the majority enforcing its will upon the minority at the point of a gun.
Only men? I always find it amusing when this kind of libertarian rhetoric forgets that women exist.
And if you want to talk about who is protecting the freedom of individuals, keep in mind that the US banned slavery considerably later than it's contemporaries. You talk of a 'gargantuan rights-violating welfare state' while at the same time lionising a state that was quite happy to literally enslave people. Not figuratively or rhetorically, but literally enslave people.
Can you read back my comments? When did I lionize the institution of slavery? The Founders got most things right philosophically, and fell short on some of the practical implementation. Eventually the Civil War rectified this contradiction.
When did I lionize the institution of slavery?
You didn't lionise the institution of slavery, but you were lionising people that made a system that supposedly was all about individual rights but was at the same time supporting slavery.
You don't get to talk about how awesome the Founding Fathers were about the rights of individuals if you get to hand-wave away the multitudes of individuals whom they had no problems putting in chains. I mean, you even specified "absent coercion" about a society with legal industrial-scale slavery!
Edit: to be clearer, the Founding Father's philosophy quite happily allowed for slavery in practice. Perhaps you shouldn't talk of it in such reverent tones - the 'welfare state' you complain of is clearly better at being fair to all individuals, not just the blessed ones that are pre-approved.
Insofar as the statement is even remotely arguably accurate as a statement of history, it would have to be about only men.
Even then, its still more mythology than reality.
You might make the point that your art benefits society as well. It might, I have no idea. But more importantly, we as society haven't agreed on that benefit (which I think needs to be talked about as well), so you don't get recognized.
Like any "standard" contract, the social one does not address everybody's needs equally, but it's the one we arrive at by consensus. And so we are bound by it as long as that consensus stays. (Or we opt out of democracy, which certain SV nutcases are certainly considering)
You might make many other points about the social contract that are valid, like e.g. the scarcity of work, the unsustainability of current society, etc. I think we need to address them, and I think the social contract will change significantly in the next 30 years.
But as it is right now, that's why employers should support people who have children.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract (You're probably familiar with it, but on the off chance you aren't, here's the link. It's not meant as snark)