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Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it is a problem that can be changed with different politics or labour unions.

The main problem is the extreme unbalance in the world. Highly develepoed robotic societys meet hungry, poor masses who cam only offer their physical labour. Mst of them in countrys far away, bu also a lot in the industrilized states.

Demand and supply. The demand for unskilled labour goes down, yet the supply of it goes up.

Most politic "solutions" only work by favoring the current residents and walling yourself in. So some better conditions for those in the country. I doubt that this is a longterm solution, when we want to live in an open global world.

So the solution I see is rather ... educating the unskilled masses, instead of fighting for better conditions for the unskilled.

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It's entirely power imbalance, and that can be addressed by policy. Fundamentally, Capital needs Labor as much as Labor needs Capital. There's no economic reason a capitalist contributing nothing should not expect to starve, but a laborer who contributes nothing should expect to, it's just the current market climate and political policy that these are the case such that the imbalance of power perpetuates itself.

It seems you could have the opposite case from today, with Labor concentrated into large unions which lobby for and win things like overly (but not disastrously) high Basic Income or slightly too relaxed intellectual property law, strong-arming a capital class made of small mom-and-pop firms and individual retiree-investors, avoiding providing the returns that would be seen in a more efficient and balanced market.

A capitalist and a laborer who both contribute nothing should expect nothing as a return.

A capitalist who contributes capital should expect investment returns, and a laborer who contributes labor should expect the agreed-upon compensation. Beyond that, the details of who should expect how much come down to supply and demand, of both labor and capital.

A capitalist who invests indiscriminately (e.g. broadly) today, has a positive expected outcome of this, and that's not a given out of the fundamental theory.

The work a capitalist does, their contribution, isn't just writing checks, it's writing the right checks.

It just happens that a capitalist writing a large number of checks happen to write a couple of right ones. And often we need them to write some wrong ones too.

Labour unions are like leeches they suck productivity and promote mediocrity. If people are unhappy with the job they should simply resign and take up another.

A cursory glance at the history of the industrial revolution, or even conditions today in several places including Amazon, will tell you what happens when labor's right to organize is crushed.

People tend to get better services and more efficient industries ?

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