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Old 04-02-2007, 01:24 PM
nietzreznor nietzreznor is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: i will find your lost ship...
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Default Re: Penn and Teller on Walmart

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The employer has a large amount of power over his/her employees, and there are plenty of people with the ability to do these kind of jobs.

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Disagreements like these are very much responsible for divides in the anarchist movement, and honestly it's kind of silly.
As anarchists, if a stateless society led to situations where a very very small percentage of people (we will call them 'bosses') owned so much stuff and had so much power that the rest of the people had to work in quite unfavorable conditions, then, hell yes, we should be concerned with this, even if the 'bosses' don't have to hold a gun to anyone's head.
But stuff like this isn't happening in a stateless society--it's happening (more or less) now, in a very unlibertarian society.
It seems to me that the only way such a small percentage of people could own so much stuff (in this case, the ownership of capital that prevents others from employing themselves) would be via the coercive power of the State.

So, yeah, we can't combat this problem (clearly) by 'helping' the workers by getting rid of the jobs they clearly prefer over whatever else they might do right now (either by min wage laws or by 'banning' businesses, etc.). But this doesn't mean that we should defend the status quo, or turn a blind eye to the problem of labor's minute bargaining power. It seems to me that workers have such small bargaining power because of government intervention on behalf of the wealthy, and thus we should take quite seriously the task of finding nongovernmental solutions to these problems.
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