Job security and socialism

SolitaryRoad.com

Website owner:  James Miller

[ Home ] [ Up ] [ Info ] [ Mail ]

I just watched the video

Why The French Economy Is UNREFORMABLE (The Union Trap).

I would say that all or nearly all of the western European countries are much more socialistic than the United States. There is a reason why so many countries are so socialistic. What is it?

For most of us a job is a fundamental requirement for having something to eat and a place to sleep. Without a job we may find ourselves sleeping on the street and without anything to eat. A job, by its nature, puts one in a position of dependence. Why? Because jobs involve bosses.

Positions of dependence are by their nature uncomfortable. People will prostitute themselves for something to eat and a place to sleep.

If you live out in the country and grow your own food you are not under a boss and are self-sufficient. If you own your own business you have no boss. If you are a farmer you don’t have a boss. But if you are like most people you have a boss and job security becomes a very important issue. Most people just don’t like a situation in which a boss with just a whim and a word can fire you and put you out on the street. People want protections. They want security. They don’t trust bosses. They don’t want to be at the mercy of the impulsiveness of some boss. And most of us know how very difficult it can be to find jobs. Desperate people can send out hundreds of applications and never get a job interview. Depending on the job situation, finding a decent job can be very difficult. A fellow with a PhD degree in Chemistry can end up washing cars to support his family. Losing one’s job can be a very traumatic experience. Life can be hard.

Can a society just let people who can’t find jobs starve to death? If the answer is no, that answer leads directly to socialistic type thinking. You force the working to support the non-working.

So what is the answer to this problem? For many people the answer is socialism or some amount of socialism. In the extreme it is Communism. Here everyone works for the government and the government takes care of everyone in its own way.

Because of all this many people join unions and want their unions to have a lot of power to protect them from arbitrary power.

Closely connected with all this is a certain very basic fact of life: No man, be he employer or employee can be trusted to act honestly and justly toward his fellow man. Put simply, people can’t be trusted. If the person is an employer he may do things like instructing people to do things that are damaging to their health. If he is an employee he may steal or shirk work.

As with most things there are pros and cons to whatever road you take. If people are given a lot of job protections, it is generally at the expense of production efficiency. If a business owner can hire and fire in any way he wishes whenever he wishes it gives him a lot more flexibility and freedom and he can run a much more efficient operation than he can if he has a lot of legal obstacles regarding what he can do.

Thus there is a tradeoff between worker rights and business efficiency. When the workers of a country have a lot of rights there is a loss in efficiency in the economy. If workers have a lot of rights they may take advantage of this and not work as hard as they would if they had no rights.

If a worker is in a job situation where he has few rights, what can he do? He can save money and invest it so as to make himself less vulnerable.

23 Dec 2025