As for your sentiment regarding "the cost to some individuals," sorry, but no. That "cost" is measured in my ability to buy food and pay my rent. To say that my ability to earn a livelihood with my labor should suffer so that you can maintain some abstract principle of your own is, at best, naive.
By that same principle - again, no more and no less - a farmer should tend land, invest in materials, acquire tools, pay taxes and grow and harvest crops so that people can just walk by and take as much of his crop as they want to walk off with, in whatever quantity they please, and do whatever they want to do with it... including sell it to other folks at a profit they choose not to share with the farmer. Surely, your "socialist" beliefs do not extend to telling farmers that their work should be exploited. Why do you assert the same to me?
(It was, by the way, exactly such exploitation that led to the establishment and popularity of socialist and communist philosophies.)
Yes, Random and Fish, this subject is personal for me. I feel deeply angered by sentiments such as yours. It's already hard enough to get paid for my work without people who clearly do not know what that work entails deciding that my labor should be worth even less. Your ideas and ideals, mistaken as they are, do directly impact on my ability to make a living. With assertions like the ones you make above, you literally de-value my work and its compensation.
Besides, "society at large" does not gain when individuals are exploited by managers of mass production. As "a socialist at heart," you should be aware that uncompensated labor yields diminishing results. And when people with something worthwhile to offer cannot or will not offer it, everybody loses out.
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By that same principle - again, no more and no less - a farmer should tend land, invest in materials, acquire tools, pay taxes and grow and harvest crops so that people can just walk by and take as much of his crop as they want to walk off with, in whatever quantity they please, and do whatever they want to do with it... including sell it to other folks at a profit they choose not to share with the farmer. Surely, your "socialist" beliefs do not extend to telling farmers that their work should be exploited. Why do you assert the same to me?
(It was, by the way, exactly such exploitation that led to the establishment and popularity of socialist and communist philosophies.)
Yes, Random and Fish, this subject is personal for me. I feel deeply angered by sentiments such as yours. It's already hard enough to get paid for my work without people who clearly do not know what that work entails deciding that my labor should be worth even less. Your ideas and ideals, mistaken as they are, do directly impact on my ability to make a living. With assertions like the ones you make above, you literally de-value my work and its compensation.
Besides, "society at large" does not gain when individuals are exploited by managers of mass production. As "a socialist at heart," you should be aware that uncompensated labor yields diminishing results. And when people with something worthwhile to offer cannot or will not offer it, everybody loses out.