[quote=“yyy, post:74, topic:158317, full:true”]
You said the right and the duty go together, and so did all those non-western countries I mentioned. (Well, maybe not Democratic Kampuchea…)[/quote]
I said a right and a duty. Some sort of quid pro quo. You’re putting words into my mouth here for strawman purposes. I think it was jotham put it a bit better than me: the right is reciprocal (or, if you prefer, the duty is reciprocal). The most qualified people to decide which quids match with which quos are the persons signing the contracts.
What does that guy have to do with anything? He’s not a poor person. He just temporarily has no money. What makes him not-poor is the asset in his head, which has motivated him to offer a win-win trade. A poor person, in contrast, would assert his right to food by painting a sign saying ‘please give me food’.
You do realise, incidentally, what he’s doing would be illegal in yyylandia? Or more accurately, he’d be allowed to hold the sign, but anyone offering him food for work would go to jail, do not pass go, etc.
That’s fine. But why not allow people to decide for themselves whether they want to be bound by those articles? They really just amount to standard terms that could be inserted into any contract, and there’s no logical reason why they couldn’t be replaced by different ones. One size rarely fits all.
As I said, I don’t have a problem with this as long as - as in the Swedish example - the government fill in the blanks properly, ie., supporting training and national standards.
This has nothing to do with being smart or stupid. People know what’s valuable to them, personally, and what person X thinks is good for him might not accord with your view of what’s good for him. Lots of people want things that will destroy them. The eternal struggle for society is to decide what we should force people to do, and what we should try to convince them to do.
It might surprise you to learn that, compared to you (or me), poor people have very different views on self-actualisation. Their life goals are not your goals. That’s why they’re poor, and it’s why I said they “want to be poor”.
I spent many years eating, drinking and sleeping with “poor people”. That life actually has something to be said for it; I have a certain sense of nostalgia for it. As long as the government keeps a roof over your head and a dole cheque in your pocket, it’s a stress-free life, mostly free of nasty surprises (except for those one brings upon oneself), and with far more free time than most people can ever hope for.
No, not really. I’d say that commerce is just a certain unremarkable type of human interaction. Commerce is only remarkable to governments because it’s the only chance they have to skim the cream; hence the common insistence from TPTB to reframe every interaction as commerce.
Because otherwise there would be fewer jobs for lawyers? 
There’s nothing wrong with establishing some standard boilerplate for employment contracts. Over time, it will come to be expected, and employers who don’t include it will be avoided as bad employers. Except, as I said, one size doesn’t fit all. Let’s say you have a gas platform employing divers. In some jurisdictions you might have The Law describing these divers as employees, and the employer therefore responsible for their welfare and provision of equipment. The reality is that divers tend to be contractors, for the simple reason that nobody is more concerned for their own welfare than they are themselves. They provide their own kit, and they charge fees accordingly.
Actually I do understand what you’re getting at: sometimes we do things just because it’s the right thing to do. And of course you’re correct. The problem here, though, is that a minimum wage is a facile solution to a much deeper problem, viz., the fact that some people (perhaps even a lot of people) are quite happy being poor. Yes, of course they’d like more money. Wouldn’t we all? But mostly we recognise that our remuneration reflects what we give to others. If there are some people with little or nothing to give, then that’s what needs fixing.
Anybody who wants to waste time drinking tea and eating ginger biscuits. All their reports and conclusions would be carefully collated, then burned. They’d then be patted on the head, told they’ve done a great job, and sent home to watch funny poor people on TV hoping to become singing stars.