LOL. This is almost childish logic. Gasoline is a commodity that you can't buy back once you use it.
It is amazing their are Freepers, the R rock base, can't understand the concept of a free market for labor. Wow.
Hence why I did not say "use"; gasoline, if sold but not used can be theoretically re-sold or re-purposed.
It is amazing their are Freepers, the R rock base, can't understand the concept of a free market for labor.
In what universe do you think America's current statutory and legal environment is a "free market for labor"?
Many people, including many self-described 'conservatives', really want to recreate the European class system our forefathers rejected. Ask them why the secretary to the assistant deputy directory of marketing should make $300,000 a year, and they'll say "That's the free market. They were able to negotiate that salary". But ask them about the balance of exchanging wages for labor, and they'll say "lazy POSs! If they don't give us what we want for what we want to pay, the problem's with THEM".
The quiet premise that motivates that reaction is a hard belief in the entitlement to SOME other peoples' labor, a belief in a moral obligation for SOME to perform, but one from which SOME OTHERS are free -- allowing them to negotiate compensation for their labor, which THEY still own. It only makes sense if you accept there are two different categories of market participants.
The same thing happened after every large pre-modern outbreak of plague. The reduction of the working-class population created a scarcity of labor available for upper-class demands, creating a market which favored the laborers who were then able to bargain for better wages. Historically, this would make the upper class "big mad" (as is said, these days), and there were many attempts to force the lower class laborers to accept ancient pay rates which no longer reflected the inflated expenses experienced by the laborers themselves. The upper class felt genuinely entitled to have that labor and thought that workers who could hold out for greater pay were unfairly taking advantage of, well, economic reality.