The Wage Slavery Movement

Chattel Slavery is a terrible thing.  A chattel slave can be punished or killed if they refuse to work, and in many cases can be sold or traded, they can be forced to breed with whoever their master demands, and the offspring are slaves from birth.  It was an institution in virtually all areas around the world from before the invention of writing, and it was widely accepted until the 19th century when it gradually began to be illegal.  Many slaveholders resisted with all their might and many wars were fought--the American Civil War being only one of them.  It is officially illegal in all countries around the world, but variations of it continue in (probably) all of them in various forms: debt bondage, serfdom, prostitution, child soldiers...estimates are around 25 million people are slaves worldwide.

Wage Slavery is a little different.  In the 19th century, a desperate person would come to a company town.  There they would be provided housing, food, friends, and most of their other needs, in return for work.  All houses, the grocery store and most others, would all be owned by the company.  Wages and prices would be such that the worker would get into debt quickly and over time this debt would grow.  As long as the worker continued to work and not cause trouble, the debt would be forgiven.  But if that changed, the full force of the law could be used to recover the unpaid debt--usually an impossible thing.  The people in the community supported each other, and generally if someone became unable to work due to age, illness or injury, the company would be supportive.  It was possible to live a relatively happy, but impoverished life as a wage slave.

The modern version of wage slavery is similar, but different in some important ways.  Rather than one company owning everything in one town, and a different company in another, in the modern scheme, the companies are technically separate, although generally within each industry they are monopolies or near to it.  The market has balanced prices so that things can remain relatively stable:  The companies providing loans will tolerate reasonably high debt as long as the person remains employed. Many companies provide pensions and health care.  In business economics, this distinction is analogous to the distinction between vertical integration and horizontal integration.

Employers like wage slavery, whether it's the 19th century, vertical kind, or the 21st century horizontal kind.  They can treat employees almost as badly as they like, and the employees have little choice but take it: the other companies pay just as badly, may not offer as good a pension or health care.   When employees have bargaining power--a unique skill, or a union, that forces them to be treated better, the employers resist with all their might.  Many employers have tried treating their employees better, from Henry Ford paying them more to keep them from going to his competition, to high tech companies offering benefits ranging from graduate school to stock ownership, and nearly always, this leads to better employees and greater productivity and profits. But it takes imagination and a leap of faith to make this move, and one thing that most business owners are not is imaginative.   For most of the 20th century, the union movement and a few enlightened political leaders, most importantly the two Roosevelts, took matters into their own hands and forced most businesses to give better pay and benefits, shorter hours and safer workplaces, and the consequence was the strongest economy the world has ever seen.

The unions were the most important source of this broad based economic boom.  The better paid workers are, the more consumer products they are able to buy, and the more money is in the economy.  Seems simple, but no economy in history had tried it--a few came close, such as the renaissance guilds, the Hanseatic league, and a number of others, but none tried it so broadly.  Not long after WWII ended, many of the participants also tried it, and their economies boomed too.

Also very important are anti-monopoly laws and government intervention when an industry had engaged in a race to the bottom.  The telephone company, the railroads and airlines, the power companies and many others.  In virtually every case, the regulated companies were more profitable than their unregulated selves, and they provided better service too.

Usury laws and bank regulation keep lenders from abusing customers, but allow them to make a fair, and very safe profit.

One of the most important regulations is the minimum wage.  It provides a bare minimum level of support--a full time worker making the minimum wage (and practicing a normal level of fiscal restraint) should not be in poverty, as long as the minimum wage matches the poverty level.

Social Support mechanisms like pensions, unemployment insurance, health insurance, education are very important.   All of these are most efficient when practiced on a large scale, so even though employers provide some of them, a baseline level is best provided by the government and supported by employers.

One of the most important is transit.  Transit allows a worker to leave a job and go to another.  Or to get to a job that's moderately far from their home.  Like the other social support mechanisms, it needs to be provided by a mechanism larger than an individual business.  The businesses benefit hugely from it and they scream when their employers lose it.

It is difficult to directly ban wage slavery, the way chattel slavery has been banned in most countries (and even then, it's impossible to ban it completely).  But all these things: unions, regulation, pensions, etc., are barriers to wage slavery.  Even a few of them, in place, can make it hard for a wage slaver to keep power.  But the leaders of the Wage Slavery movement, organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce, the American Legislative Exchange Council, The funders of the the Tea Party movement (including the Koch brothers), the various right wing "think tanks", have set about destroying all of these things.  And in the past decade, they have succeeded.

Guns, Drugs and Immigration

The administration has announced new spending to stem the tide of undocumented children immigrating to the US, fleeing from drug violence in Mexico and Central America.  The number of such children coming in over the border has roughly doubled to 50,000 a year.  This is an appalling international tragedy and the response has been to trap the children in a hopeless situation.  Their home is being destroyed and they have nowhere to go.

Why is this happening?  American drug policy makes it very profitable to import and sell drugs in the US.  To some degree the demand for these drugs is home-grown, but the profitability creates a large incentive for the smugglers to stimulate this demand.  The labor doing the smuggling and distribution are mostly poor and desperate, but the people running the cartels make gigantic profits and the smugglers and distributors are viewed as expendable.   When they are caught, they go into the partially private American prison system, which is profitable for the prison operators.

There are numerous competing cartels, and each is vying to control this lucrative market.  They are already outlaws, and in many cases they are more powerful than their local police, so much of this competition comes in the form of violence.  The region is awash in firearms, virtually all of them smuggled in across the US/Mexico border. The US has attempted to staunch the flow of firearms but they have met intense opposition from the US gun industry and their lobbyist, the NRA.  The "fast and furious" program was such an effort.

I see 4 problems here, all created entirely by backwards policy driven by conservatives and their corporate puppeteers:

Drug addiction should be viewed as a mental health problem, not as a crime.  Addicts should be kept out of society until their addictions are stabilized, but they should not share housing with murderers and other violent criminals--unless they are also such criminals.  Many addicts need long term treatment, but much such treatment can be done as outpatient care for very much lower cost and recidivism than incarceration.

The most popular illegal drug, Marijuana, is substantially less dangerous than many legal drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, and should not be illegal at all, beyond DUI rules and use by children and so forth.  Marijuana is only a problem today because it is illegal.  Legalizing Pot would substantially reduce all of these other problems, although most of them stem from the more dangerous drugs so it wouldn't cure them.

 For-profit prisons should probably be banned.  The incentive to wrongly incarcerate and thus steal from the taxpayers is simply too high.

The NRA should probably be banned as a terrorist organization.  The gun industry needs lobbyists and firearms hobbyists need a representative, but the NRA has swung so far off the rails that I think there is no saving it.  All firearms should be in a national registry and all transfers should be tracked.  If you sell a gun to drug runners or their representatives, or put it in a situation where such could happen by accident, you need to go to jail.   Because of the history of guns in the founding of our country, we need to be very careful.  Any such actions must have careful due diligence, probably involving the court system, especially confiscations. 

Finally, is illegal immigration really a problem?  Only a little.  Most immigrants, legal or not, are willing to work hard, get educated, pay taxes, follow all other laws.  There are fewer than 12M illegals, of about 40M total immigrants.  Legal immigrants are just as likely to be criminals, take jobs that could go to other people, end up homeless.  Illegals are much more likely to be abused by employers, landlords, gangs, etc.  They hurt us only in the way that a too-low minimum wage does: it depresses wages for everyone else.