> If you are voluntarily selling your labor, it means that you are getting the best value for it.
I hold a gun to the head of someone you love. I tell you you will deliver something or I will kill them. You start to negotiate for how much you will be paid for your labor...do you think you will get the best value for your labor, overall? Or will you simply prevent the loss of life of your loved one?
You'd likely just be happy to prevent that grievous loss.
The poor are under the same terms except instead of a gun it is starvation or homelessness that is the threat to themselves or their loved ones.
This is just the simplest and most apropo example of misbehaved transactions. Not all voluntary transactions result in the best value for each party. You are correct that they would get more for their labor if they could but the deviant nature of the transaction keeps it from being a value trade and creates, instead, a struggle to lose the least amount they can -- a destruction of value for that party but, if mitigated, the best possible destruction of value from their point of view. It is not a healthy part of the system.
Think of a protection racket -- are those people getting the best value? Or simply getting the least amount of destruction of value given the circumstances? Those two things are not the same.
I hold a gun to the head of someone you love. I tell you you will deliver something or I will kill them. You start to negotiate for how much you will be paid for your labor...do you think you will get the best value for your labor, overall? Or will you simply prevent the loss of life of your loved one?
You'd likely just be happy to prevent that grievous loss.
The poor are under the same terms except instead of a gun it is starvation or homelessness that is the threat to themselves or their loved ones.
This is just the simplest and most apropo example of misbehaved transactions. Not all voluntary transactions result in the best value for each party. You are correct that they would get more for their labor if they could but the deviant nature of the transaction keeps it from being a value trade and creates, instead, a struggle to lose the least amount they can -- a destruction of value for that party but, if mitigated, the best possible destruction of value from their point of view. It is not a healthy part of the system.
Think of a protection racket -- are those people getting the best value? Or simply getting the least amount of destruction of value given the circumstances? Those two things are not the same.