Comment by cogman10
1 year ago
> I really do not understand why governments aren't working hard to make this kind of gig-economy illegal.
Because there's a large number of people who take the writings of Ayan Rand and the policies of Ronald Regan as the best way to run government.
Workers' rights are being eroded because we've slowly dismantled and privatized as much of the government as possible.
Workers' rights are incompatible with small government and or libertarian ideals. Much like other rights such as civil rights. Or rights to clean water, air, and food.
Big government isn't perfect, but for its flaws there are benefits having a large organization with a bigger stick to beat in line robber barons whose entire goal is to undermine rights as much as possible to leach maximum profit from society.
>Because there's a large number of people who take the writings of Ayan Rand and the policies of Ronald Regan as the best way to run government.
Are these people currently running e.g. the UK?
Well first off, yes for a very long time the party in charge of the UK was the Tories from 2010 all the way up to 2024.
But further, the current prime minister of the UK got there by and large by abandoning Labour party positions in favor of explicitly supporting nothing. Starmer literally used Margret Thatcher, the UK equivalent of Regan, as an example of an excellent prime minister. Starmer is very much the UK equivalent of Bill Clinton, a conservative leader of the historically "progressive" party.
Starmer has been in power all of 7 months now.
despite that, the employment rights bill is at least moving in the right direction
It seems very weird that they somehow do have labor laws over there, though. They even forced Uber to make their drivers have worker protections, quite strange to be honest. Maybe Thatcherite neo-liberals sometimes mistake the oppress everyone check box, with the worker rights check box. Who knows...
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The best thing for the people is hard, actual systematic competition where the ruling class lifes in constant fear.
I disagree. We've had 40+ years where that's been the central thesis of both Democrats and Republicans in the US and where has that led us?
Some industries and functions are most efficiently ran by a single government body. Competing in those sorts of constrained markets only tends to create single monopolistic companies. That's because it's either too expensive for a competitor to enter, or other factors force competitors out.
For example, we aren't going to see new private jail companies.
But even in places where there is stiff competition, the incentives of the business owners is not to make the lives of their employees or the services good. It's to make them profitable. A good example of this is senior care facilities. Often understaffed, overcrowded, and overpriced. Another is what's happening with real estate right now. Rent prices have shot up everywhere not because of a lack of competition, but because of collusion of the landlords through pricing systems like yeildstar.
An important role of government is to step in and solve for these injustices. Something or government has completely shirked because of dumb quips like Regan's "the scariest phrase is 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'" or Clinton's "The era a big government is over".
This is why I don’t complain much about airlines (except their mergers)