The effects of wage slavery on people are neither as bad nor as inescapable as the effects of welfare clientization.

Both terms are derogatory toward capitalism and socialism respectively. Both conditions are created by a cultural trend toward complacency. You can not be a wage slave unless you buy, literally, into the consumer culture. If you consume only what you truly need then you will not be a slave to your wage. Welfare... I've know several people who utilized welfare as a stop gap measure. These are folks who were on welfare no longer that it tool to find employment. I'm talking somewhere on the order of 6 weeks or so. The problem is that most folks get complacent and continue to draw on the system. They pass those values to their children and it spirals down from there. In each case it boils down to pride and self worth. At least with wage slavery the ball is your court and you have the power to change. Welfare, farewell to that idea.

Yeah, I'm pretty much with you there. Although with regard to wage slavery, I think the real killer isn't buying into the consumer culture so much as accepting the notion - even consumer culture's a good if desire for shiny consumer goods gives you the ambition to get out of there - and not having the ambition to sacrifice short-term comfort to move on to something better in the long-term.

(Also, in which I do not disagree with you but which I will just stipulate in this comment for future readers, I have no problem at all with welfare that bridges people over to find employment. It's the kind that causes clientization in the mid to long term that bugs me.)

At least nobody will starve as a welfare client, as long as the state can provide.

There's more to living than not starving.

There's more to living than working 60 hours a week just to put food on the table.

More people who work for lousy wages get out of that lifestyle and into something worthwhile than long-term welfare clients do, so it's a net gain overall.

In today's system, that's true for the childless. Much less true for those with kids, I suspect. And that's only true because the state prevents the worst kinds of employee abuse.

Well, that's a whole other issue, and that issue is "People who can't afford to support children without impoverishing themselves shouldn't have children."

It's not like this is still the pre-birth-control era, and while I (and I suspect other people) will gladly pay for welfare to bridge hiccups in people's lives and for that matter things like educational grants to improve people's lives, I balk at paying to deconsequence people's stunningly bad life choices.

I think you misinterpreted my use of 'wage slavery.'

I meant it entirely literally, a la sharecropping.
That being said, I disagree regardless.

In that case, though, then my problem is that you're attributing something, namely sharecropping, to laissez-faire capitalism that isn't capitalism (in the economic sense of the word, not as misapplied in common usage) at all.

Arguably, the condition was brought about by a lack of government restrictions and rules governing appropriate business practices (such as during the late Industrial Revolution).

True, but it's a lack of government restrictions to enforce capitalism that was the problem, I would say.

I'd like some evidence. I'd also like to know what luxuries you think people can give up to avoid being slaves to their wages... health care? dental care? preventative care? those are the incredibly big expenses, although replacing clothes and shoes when they wear out can get difficult, especially if your job requires a particular dress code. Glasses can be quite expensive. Transportation, of course, is always an issue. Live near work and it's generally more expensive rent. Live further away and you incur serious transportation costs.

If you look at it as what you have to give up, then you'll never avoid being slaves to your wages. We are born with certain inalienable needs, after all, starting with food, water and shelter, and moving up from there. We have to produce them in order to live; that's a simple matter of biological necessity.

Man isn't born free and everywhere in chains, like Rousseau said; man is born in chains to those needs, because he has to produce to live (or steal, but let's assume ethical people). "If you don't work, you die" is effectively natural law.

If you work hard enough, or long enough, or are smart enough to hang on to inherited wealth (which most heirs aren't), then you get to keep this at a greater distance than most for a while, but the rich who don't work don't stay rich very long. Even they are slaves to nature, here.

That's life.

As for evidence - well, really, an eyeball comparison of the working class to the unworking underclass shows the difference dramatically.

Because of our society, we have the opportunity to set different rules for ourselves, should we wish it. We can easily provide for those who cannot provide for themselves. In my view, even those who can but choose not to provide for themselves should be afforded a minimum of housing, food and water at least, simply because we can as a society. I think that the French and Germans may go a little bit too far in providing state assistance, to the point where people have a disincentive to work, but I think the US does not go far enough.

I'd have to disagree, there, and for two reasons.

Firstly, because as the UK and European experience demonstrates, once you have a population of the unproductive, it's catching. That population multiplies remarkably quickly, and then you suddenly have all kinds of fun social problems that you didn't have before. And eventually, once it gets too big, your economy falls over and drops everyone in the shit.

And secondly, I don't like what encouraging/permitting dependency does to people. In the UK, where I used to live, there was a very large and well provided for unproductive underclass, most of whom were several generations beyond providing for themselves, uneducated, uncultured, and frankly a damn sight closer to unsapient than I ever thought a human being could get. I think being a perpetual dependent breaks people in a very fundamental way, and so I've concluded that it's much more of an affront to human dignity than any possible alternative.

Then you need to fix the problem of education. Supporting life without supporting education does lead to serious problems. And, in the US, it's a lot harder to get educated to be able to hold down a good job than to get some assistance to barely survive. This strikes me as bad. However, I still agree with Rorek. We should help out humans, because we can.

And, of course, it multiplies - they don't die.

It's not a matter of providing education. If you are going to spend your entire life as a fully supported client of the state, and you know this because that's what your parents did, and in some cases that's what your grandparents or great-grandparents did, and you've spent your entire life in a culture that places no value on education and a lot of value on whim-driven pleasureseeking - why on earth would you bother to try and get an education?

As for helping - these people aren't being helped. They're being infantilized and thrown away, essentially, so that the people in the middle can exercise their compassion and feel good about themselves.

(No, that would be a ZPG scenario. They multiply, there, because the generous British welfare state subsidized bastardry with more money and free housing.)

I strongly suspect that what you're describing is the much held up minority. I know of people who have used UK welfare and Australia welfare, and their stories are much more like the more common US stories - people who ran into hard times or have serious health problems. But what do you hear about in the US? The minority that abuse the system. Countless, countless people can't use the system because the system assumes you're a no-good loser thief, and that's all that people ever see of it. But really, most people on it aren't like that. And without proof, I don't believe it's like that where you are. And I highly doubt you actually know.

Though I recall hearing about the Spanish system, I believe, where several jobs pay less than unemployment insurance (leading to people never finding a new job because they'd end up with lower receipts).

Admittedly, it sounds like very, very piss-poor implementation than a fundamental flaw.

Go look at the statistics. They're really rather easy to find.

But that doesn't mean the system is flawed, it means several implementations are flawed. There's a clear difference between the two cases.

Given that the systems in various European countries are different, (and the US system most different still, and in what I would consider the superior direction), and that the results differ mostly by degree, and that Benjamin Franklin was complaining about this effect back in the 18th century, one can reasonably draw a general picture from the specifics. In my judgement.

No, not really. Not without in-depth careful statistical analysis. This is exactly the sort of area where people tend to be totally wrong and biased by a few salient examples and miss the big picture. And Franklin, despite being a remarkable person and quite brilliant, was human, and just as prone to cognitive biases as any other human.

This is an area where people tend to be wrong. So, my default position will be to believe you are wrong until given good proof otherwise.

Mine, too, only in the other sense.

STFU and gimme mah check.

Interesting wording, Alistair. Care to put it in plain English?