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> As a leftie, I don't care that much about the right to enter into a contract What is your limiting principle then? Our social contract is based on the idea t

> As a leftie, I don't care that much about the right to enter into a contract What is your limiting principle then? Our social contract is based on the idea that government does not have unlimited power and that there are individual rights that can not be discarded even via majority rule. Are you unwilling to apply any sort of value metric on laws? I'm not sure I follow your chain of reasoning on wage/UBI/taxes, but there is a part of what you say that I think I would agree with: That if we want to provide a social safety net it should be done explicitly via general taxes and a redistribution mechanism rather than micro-managing commerce.

int_19h 8y ago
To clarify, it's not that I don't recognize the right, I just don't think it's as important as e.g. freedom of speech (nor is it a subset). And clearly the society we live in agrees, because we have numerous laws that regulate contracts, e.g. bans on non-competes, right-to-work laws etc. The chain of reasoning wrt wages is simple: when you raise min wage, it is factored into the cost of goods, proportionally to the amount of min wage labor that went into their creation. In other words, cheaper goods and services get more expensive, and people who buy them end up footing the bill. So when you raise min wage, it's subsidized more by McDonald's customers than by Starbucks customers. So we're basically providing guaranteed income for employed - that's the basic income part - but we pay for it using an implicit regressive sales tax.
- gwright 8y ago
  We also have numerous laws regarding speech (fraud, libel, slander, threats, incitement, etc). I'm not sure it is useful to attempt to "rank" individual rights. I think it could be argued that the freedom to enter into contracts is just a special case of freedom of association, which I'm guessing you would agree is pretty important.

int_19h 8y ago

To clarify, it's not that I don't recognize the right, I just don't think it's as important as e.g. freedom of speech (nor is it a subset). And clearly the society we live in agrees, because we have numerous laws that regulate contracts, e.g. bans on non-competes, right-to-work laws etc. The chain of reasoning wrt wages is simple: when you raise min wage, it is factored into the cost of goods, proportionally to the amount of min wage labor that went into their creation. In other words, cheaper goods and services get more expensive, and people who buy them end up footing the bill. So when you raise min wage, it's subsidized more by McDonald's customers than by Starbucks customers. So we're basically providing guaranteed income for employed - that's the basic income part - but we pay for it using an implicit regressive sales tax.

gwright 8y ago
We also have numerous laws regarding speech (fraud, libel, slander, threats, incitement, etc). I'm not sure it is useful to attempt to "rank" individual rights. I think it could be argued that the freedom to enter into contracts is just a special case of freedom of association, which I'm guessing you would agree is pretty important.