All that you have done in your other thread is to show that the enlightenment philosophers favored free, spontaneous, and creative action. Not that it was synonymous with freedom and liberty. Also, to suggest that Smith opposed the division of labor is foolish. He was weary of it and though that certain things had to be done to counteract negative effects of the division of labor, but that is all. I think that certain things have to be done to prevent negative impacts of taking too large a quantity of drug X, for instance, by having a recommended dosage, but this does not mean that I oppose drug X. I also find Chomsky’s argument that Smith promoted markets because they would lead to equality, and not universal advancement, as very arcane since Smith spends a great amount of time talking about why it is that wage gaps do indeed exist.
Slavery is not the same as employment. I am not holding someone as my property, the matter of the inalienability, or alienability of labor is a different matter from slavery if only because of the extent. But here’s something that might make you a little bit frustrated and which, to my knowledge, no one here has actually mentioned. Murray N. Rothbard agreed with you. He thought that labor was something which was indeed inalienable because someone can not stop owning their body. He opposed the idea of employment in terms of “I give you this and you must do this”, rather he supported along the lines of a “If you do this then I will give you this”. If I acknowledge your premise and build it into my practices, then I can’t agree to exchange with someone preemptively for a promise of their labor in the future, but I can tell them that if they do something then they will recieve a cash payment from me, a promissory note to my alienable money to their inalienable labor if they do exchange it to a certain extent. This cannot in any way be considered slavery unless all exchange between men are to be invalid. A mother telling her child that if he sets the table then he will get a treat is enslaving her child, as are all communist interactions.
Here’s some quotes for you:
As mentioned above, a man may not agree to permanent bondage by contracting to work for another man for the rest of his life. He might change his mind at a later date, and then he cannot, in a free market, be compelled to continue working thereafter. Because a man’s self-ownership over his will is inalienable, he cannot, on the unhampered market, be compelled to continue an arrangement whereby he submits his will to the orders of another, even though he might have agreed to this arrangement previously…
-Chapter 2 Section 12
On the other hand, take the case of a promise to contribute personal services without an advance exchange of property. Thus, suppose that a movie actor agrees to act in three pictures for a certain studio for a year. Before receiving any goods in exchange (salary), he breaks the contract and decides not to perform the work. Since his personal will is inalienable, he cannot, on the free market, be forced to perform the work there. Further, since he has received none of the movie company property in exchange, he has committed no theft, and thus the contract cannot be enforced on the free market. Any suit for “damages” could not be entertained on an unhampered market. The fact that the movie company may have made considerable plans and investments on the expectation that the actor would keep the agreement may be unfortunate…
Any such enforced payment would be an invasion of his property rights on the free market rather than an attack upon invasion. It may be considered more moral to keep promises than to break them, but the condition of a free market is that each individual’s rights of person and property be maintained, and not that some further standard of morals be coercively imposed on all. Any coercive enforcement of such a moral code, going beyond the abolition of invasive acts, would in itself constitute an invasion of individual rights of person and property and be an interference in the free market
-Chapter 2 Section 13
“On a free market, they cannot purchase labor services outright, as was explained in the preceding chapter. Since man’s personal will is inalienable, he cannot, in a voluntary society, be compelled to work for another against his present will, and therefore no contracts can be made for purchase of his future will. Labor services, therefore, can only be bought for “hire,” on a “pay-as-you-go” basis.”
-Chapter 3 section 5
-Murray Rothbard: Man, Economy, and State
Congratulations! Libertarians (because that’s what we qualify as now right?) accept that you cannot sell your labor. What’s your problem again?
In the socialist society one will still be “employed”, just not in the same words. You will still have to do work for goods and services, unless you think it will all be done out of charity which could still come out of the capitalist society, and which would not have to come about in the socialist society.
My belief that socialism (Even in the libertarian sense) will result in destruction is because of an open economic analysis after reading Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, Chomsky, Proudhon, and Guerin as well as reading and listening to a lot of material on the subject and talking to socialists and even came to the conclusion that it might be sustainable and could, in some situations, be a good complement to capitalism. That’s biased as hell, isn’t it? I’m sure that you performed a similar process while rejecting capitalism, right?