On Wage Slavery

I think "Wage Slavery" is a false term.

Wages are what employees gain from their service and labor to their employer. It is an act of voluntary exchange on the part of both parties. If wages were not gained by this service then slavery would exist, in the presence of wages though it is merely employment by mutual terms.

Slavery, historically, is the position of a person who through compulsion is held against their will and forced (by threat of violence)to work for the gain of the "slaveholder or slave master".

Using the word wages in conjunction with the word slavery does two things. One it lowers the definition of wages to the negative connotation of being forced to work for the benefit of another without ANY reimbursement. Secondly it tends to negate the real horrors of real slavery that has happened and is still happening around the world.  

The term "wage slavery" defined deals with those wages that are so low that a person who is employed relies on them just for basic survival. Of course wages should be used in the pursuit of survival and any wants left to be pursued, if that is the want of the wage earner. One cannot force a person to use their own property in any other way that they do not wish. 

Hereto we must interject on the reverse side of this issue. Mandatory wage and Minimum wage laws handed down from government bureaus and departments. These laws force businesses and businesses owners to provide wages beyond that of market value or personal labor value. These laws almost always lead to higher prices in market goods as the mandatory minimum wages are offset in the businessman's pursuit to maintain certain levels of profit. 

Wage Slavery is a false point being made by those that wish to direct the affairs of businesses that do not affect them in the personal way.

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The Mises Institute has always promoted scholarship and education in the pursuit of liberty. Ideas have always been at the heart of our mission.

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The 50+ courses in the Mises Curriculum at the Mises Institute will guide you through Austrian economics, from the action axiom to advanced monetary theory, and through libertarian political philosophy, from the non-aggression principle to advanced libertarian legal theory. Also included are courses on history, philosophy, and even logic.

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Ideas Have Consequences

Ludwig von Mises demonstrated that all governments, and the social order itself, depend onideology, which he defined as “the totality of our doctrines concerning individual conduct and social relations,” and which includes both doctrines that concern ends, like political philosophies, and doctrines that concern means, like economic theories. Therefore, it is ultimately ideology that is what gives a state the widespread influence, or “might,” as Mises called it, that it needs to rule.

Thus, contrary to Mao’s famous dictum, political power flows not from the barrel of a gun but from ideas. In fact, Mao’s own rise to power, and that of many like him, was ultimately due in large part to the fact that the idea of a planned society, including its purest form, socialism, had captured the hearts, minds, and imaginations of entire generations, from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Its time had come, however fleetingly, and many regimes that tried to stop the march of socialist ideas with force utterly failed. It was only widespread disenchantment with socialism that halted the march.

Moreover, freedom from political power is also ultimately based on ideas. When the time does come for the ideas of liberty — libertarian political philosophy and sound economics — it won’t be, as The New York Times recently put it, a “libertarian moment.” It will be, as Ron Paul clarified, a “libertarian transition.” And the state, for all its weapons and cages, will be powerless to stop it, because the ideas of liberty are the negation of the ideas upon which the state’s power rests.

It was the ideas of the political philosophers of liberalism and of the laissez-faire economists that were ultimately responsible for the limited flowering of liberty that occurred prior to the rise of the modern managerial state.

And it is the ideas of thinkers like Mises and Murray Rothbard, propagated by institutions like the Mises Institute and individuals like you, which can give moral leaders like Ron Paul the “might” to sway the public to choose liberty. That is the battle of ideas before us.

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