Doing Without Socialism

THE HUMAN TENDENCY to take for granted whatever conditions we are accustomed to causes us often to overlook some basic characteristics of our daily lives, conditions which are always present, but overlooked and unseen.

for example, no matter what your job is, no matter where you work in the united states, or for matter in most countries, the conditions under whcih you work are very strongly and directly controlled by government, by government regulations implemented only after long periods of social-political agitation, discussion, and disputation which resulted, at long painful last, in legislation.

There is a limit to how little any employer is allowed to pay any employee, how many hours in a week a worker may be required to work, what steps every employer must take when a worker is injured, what compensation is required when a worker is terminated for any reason, what working  conditions must be provided, and so on, seemingly endlessly.

What would the world of work be like in our modern world without all this regulation by government? The best answer is to look back at a time when such regulation indeed did not exist, as in the monumental novel "The Jungle" by upton cinclair, published over a hundred years ago, and still widely read.

It is a story of the meat packing industry in chicago at the end of the nineteenth century, when there existed practically no government regulation of any kind. There is no reason to believe that conditions would be any different now, were it not for a century of subsequent involvemnt in the free market by government, acting through the democratic process.

 The conditions described in "The Jungle" seem unbelievably horrible to us today, because they are so different from those we take for granted. Can you imagine working for  a company that can dictate the number of hours you work each  day, each week, each month, and  pay you, or not pay you, whatever it decides, with no recourse of any kind for you, under conditions which can be as dirty, hot, cold, dangerous, and generally unpleasant as determined by the bosses? A company that can fire you for any reason at any time, and black list you, again with no recourse?

Without the government intervention and oversight we have now, business owners would be just as free to treat employess the same way today as they could and did a  hundred and twenty years ago, and would have exactly the same tempting reasons for so doing; namely , the chance to maximize profit by squeezing maximum work from workers for minumal return.

every government regulation concerning business is socialism; minimum wage, maximum hours, working conditions, injury prevention and compensation, all of them. Too much socialistic big government in our lives, you say? Which of the above examples would you do away with?