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Imma open up a can of worms here...

The whole idea of "wage slavery" as it's commonly understood is completely bogus.

There. I said it.

After a couple months of relatively little activity on the Steemit platform, I'm coming back in full force to tackle what I consider to be one of the most annoying economic fallacies.

The Argument:

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Capitalism has created a world where men and women are enslaved by work and by money. The differences between owning a person and renting a person are negligible. In the capitalist system, corporations can "rent" a person's labour and pay them well enough to keep them satisfied for the day, but little enough to ensure that they remain working under the corporation's thumb.

In this system, people require money to survive, and they can only get their money by selling themselves into the service of the rich and powerful.

That's the basic plot.

The Counter:

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Capitalism isn't inherently oppressive. But do you know what is? Nature.

Long before capitalism or even money existed, guess what: people had to work to survive.

Capitalism has created new systems that make the work-survival relationship a little bit less direct. You're (likely) no longer hunting, gathering, farming, or building for yourself. Instead, you trade your labour for tokens which represent a market value and can be traded for the means of survival.

Wage slavery? No. We're slaves to nature. We're still overcoming the oppression of nature. It's just gotten a little more complicated.

The Real Wage Slavery

But here's where it get's tricky. In Western Civilization we are slaves to money. A man can't go find a patch of forest and build a home for himself and live off of the land. But that has nothing to do with the systems of capitalism. The blame for that is all on government.

Any unclaimed land is owned by the government. You aren't free to live there. You must use money to purchase property.

But maybe once you've bought a plot of land you can be free of money, right? Wrong. You must keep earning money to submit to the government's extortion racket pay taxes.

Your need for money will never end and that's because of government.

All these antifa kids and socialists complaining about wage slavery and demanding government solutions are appealing to the tyrants who enslaved us in the first place.

Oh, the irony.

~Seth