A debate that's no longer on health care, but is on forms of government

Here's my latest installment in the ongoing debate with kungfooguru about communism versus the free market. Sorry for the long delay in posting, I got distracted.

Here's kungfooguru's last post.

I was a little disappointed with your response to my last post. You spent most of it responding to my examples and not using them to explain the principles behind your beliefs. If we debate the trivialities of examples back and forth we won't get anywhere. Yes, in most, if not all of my examples "it's not that simple", but I believe the general principle holds true.

Pertaining to schools, you said that "tax payer money should be distributed across the schools equally." Why? If I want to only donate to my children's school, or only to schools with a teaching philosophy that I agree with, or only to schools with a certain percentage of the students as minorities, isn't that my right? If you would say it's not, you would take away my right to do what I want with all the fruits of my labor. Why would I earn that money in the first place?

I wasn't entirely clear on what you said about dichloroacetate. I mention it not to further defend my example, but because you asked "And are you not against large corporations?" No, I'm not against large corporations per se, but I am strongly against laws that support any corporation or person over anyone else. That's why I want to eliminate the government's power to help them with subsidies, tariffs on imported competing goods, and regulations that protect the company from competitors and replacement products.

Finally, in your example contradicting my general analysis of free market actors you talked about baseball players getting the right to at will employment. Firstly, my analysis was an oversimplification; what I said were absolute decisions are not in fact absolute. They are fuzzy factors affecting the final decision. (If you could only get food from a murderer or a con artist, you wouldn't refuse both and starve to death.) Secondly, I'm not familiar with baseball's employment system even today, so I'm mostly guessing at what you meant.

My counterpoint hinges on what can be considered "exploitation". You say that the owners make deals together to make more profit and exploit the players. I say this is only possible if those players were only capable of playing baseball and doing nothing else. If so, then yes, the owners would be exploiting the situation the players are in by paying them as little as they could, knowing the players couldn't go anywhere else. (Even in this case, "exploitation" is arguable.) But the players were perfectly capable of taking any other job that someone of their race and age in their physical condition could take. If they felt exploited by their team's owner and weren't making the money they thought they were worth, then why did they stay on the team when they could have stacked boxes, or repaired engines, or laid bricks? They listened to the deal that the owners gave them and accepted it. They weren't being exploited, they were going in to the deal with their eyes wide open. I bet they were even happy to get the deal, because there were probably plenty more people who wanted to play but didn't make it.

I say that an employer, any employer, not just baseball owners, cannot exploit their workers. They can either uphold their contract with the worker, or violate that contract. If the worker doesn't like the terms they're getting with their employer, it's their duty to leave the job and get one they like better if they're qualified for it. Note that there is a good counterargument to this that would have me on your side pertaining to land ownership, but I don't have a clear opinion on that yet so if I opened that can of worms this would all be a confusing mess.

You also mentioned "The places in the United States and the rest of the world where the employees do not make enough to be able to live without their jobs." Isn't that the point of a job, to provide the means to live? When you remove all the division of labor that modern economics gives us, a person's ultimate job is to find food and defend one's self against predators. If food is scarce and predators are common in your area, that could be a 24 hour a day job. Who's exploiting who in that situation? Coming back to more modern times, the displaced farmers in "The Grapes of Wrath" were probably poor enough to qualify as unable to live without their jobs by your standards, having to move halfway across the country to get work after losing their family farm. But they were still able to go on strike against their employer for higher wages.