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Comment by joelrunyon | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this a bit obvious? Getting both complete freedom is at odds with certainty. There's an inherent tradeoff in the two commodities.

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There are some attempts to combine them, which is gradually becoming one of the preferred EU strategies (though countries vary widely in their opinions): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity

The basic idea is that it should be easy to hire/fire people ("flexible labor market", vs. the traditional less-flexible European model), but social policy should smooth out some of the economic uncertainty that produces.

It's considered a very good idea over here, I think, but it requires the government to redistribute money from people who work to people who don't, so everyone gets security without needing predictability. I don't think it's very popular in southern Europe, though.

In southern Europe, at the moment the idea is to give as much flexibility to hire/fire people and at the same time reduce as much as possible any benefits for people that fall on hard times.

Quick example, unemployment used to be at 75% of net income (give or take). Then they changed it to 70, then 65%. Then they capped it at 1600 euros, then 1200. Now it is capped at 1000 euros for the first 6 months, and then 900 afterwards (and the length has also been shortened).

Doesn't matter if you were earning 10,000 euros a month or 2,000, now you both get max 1000 euros unemployment, even thou one of you paid 5 times as much in social security payments.

(quick note, values are approximate as I remember this from 2 years ago).

It's easier to save on that than it is to save on tax dodging and stimulate the economy with less regulatory capture and corruption, unfortunately. It's the tragedy of austerity, that the wrong measures seem to get taken.

On the contrary, freedom is defined as the ability to do what you want, which implies a very great deal of certainty - the certainty that you won't be attacked, run out of money, run out of food, that you'll have shelter tonight, and so on.

The uncertainty of not having enough money for food, shelter, medical care, education, raising children, and so on is a huge limitation on freedom.

We see this very explicitly in concepts such as tenure: certainty = freedom.

You're mixing up freedom with safety.

The conflict between freedom and certainty is real. Having enough money for food, shelter and medical care means having the ability to command other people to grow food for you, build a shelter for you and provide medical care for you. These people do what you want them to do instead of doing what they would like. Your safety is improved. Your providers' freedom is reduced.

I think what we're seeing here is companies using automation to offload certain costs on to their workers - and then use the guise of "freedom" to paper it over.

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