The most liberating insight I had in studying economics is that every person in a relatively free country already is a company of one, even if each individual is “employed” by another company. The negotiation of salary or wage is one in which the employee is negotiating the price of his/her labor, and in that sense is selling something, or purchasing services/facilities from the employer, or in reality both.
This might be a controversial take but by that reasoning, I don't think America is a particularly free country. Most people need to work whatever shitty job they can get and class mobility is relatively difficult even with things like higher education and the like
“Most people need to work whatever shitty job they can get”
Even as someone who grew up well below the poverty line, this wasn’t true ime. The vast majority of adults aren’t impoverished. They’re quite clearly choosing not to work the shitty jobs that would make them impoverished, usually through skills they’ve chosen to acquire.
While I don’t have the stats on what percentage of people exercise job choice — these stats are completely unobtainable - I don’t think there’s an argument that can reasonably suggest it’s >50 (or even 20)
I think that most people have the possibility to choose, but the cost of choosing (in terms of lost income, lost vacations, uncertainty and risk to immigration status) are prohibitive enough to favour the employers.
Sure, people can upskill or move across the country, but that's prohibitively expensive and not guaranteed to work. A lot of people are trapped by this.
You're right. Employees do tend to have a lot of options. But I think the balance is still in employers' favor for most workers when it comes to making decisions for the employee.
Running your own business is not necessarily more freedom than being employed. It's easy to think you can decided everything yourself, but you have customers pulling you here and there, you have rules and regulations, accounting, taxes, bills. Maybe sales is not going as well as you want or you have too much work on your table which is hard to off-load.
That's an exception, for several reasons. The US government isn't going away any time soon, and can't just die or go bankrupt like a normal customer. Also, the government has an interest in keeping multiple contractors competing with each other, so they'll intentionally spread work out among competing contractors to keep them all busy and in business. It's just not like any other company.
Also, defense contractors frequently have multiple customers, in a way. First, many contractors sell their stuff to foreign customers (after getting approval from the USG of course, frequently with degraded capabilities). Lots of countries are buying the F-35 for instance. Also, contractors frequently have multiple customers within the government. They might sell to the Air Force and the Army, for instance, or the CIA and the NSA. Those are all different agencies, and act like different customers, without that much coordination between them, and each has its own funding and does its own contracts with contractors.
Go further. On the outside, you've got maybe 75,000 hours to sell. After that, the warehouse is empty. Better try to get the best price you can for each one.
