Maybe the author means "egalitarian" or some other concept tangentially related to democracy. Voluntarily formed hierarchies are perfectly consistent with a free and democratic society.
But points to the author on hitting people's emotional buttons with her victim/outrage politics.
Employment relationships are contractual, and completely voluntary. People need income to live, sure, but they are not forced to work for any one person or company to receive that income.
The working conditions mentioned in the article are insane, but you "vote" by choosing not to work for that company.
I also take issue with "Like Louis XIV’s government, the typical American workplace is kept private from those it governs." What world is the author living in where normal governments disclose 100% of the information they hold or receive?
If it were a true dictatorship, as the article claims, you would have no say in where you apply, what you accept, when you decide to leave, etc.
Would chattel slavery be voluntary too if the slaves had a degree of choice over which master used them?
People were literally considered pieces of property under chattel slavery. "Salary slavery" is nowhere near as horrific or demeaning as real slavery, and it's frankly an offensive comparison to make.
If you want to never work a job in your life, pan handle on the streets, live off your relatives, or become a recluse, you are completely free to do so. Nobody is holding a gun (or a whip) over you and demanding you work.
Democratic schools do exist, but they are few and far in between.
I get what you are saying... that it is a click bait title, but the fact remains that the late-stage capitalistic hierarchies that form are not totally unlike other labor systems (indentured servitude/slavery) that we have generally deemed as immoral.
For a lot of folks in low wage positions, the mere act of looking for an alternative puts their current wages in jeopardy. Their employer may decide they're now disloyal and sack them. They bring home less money because they have to spend unpaid time searching for a new gig -- they'd do it outside of work hours, but at some point you have to sleep and feed the kids, right?
Because by optional we mean a totally free choice -- not merely the necessity to chose among N available options (lest you starve).
There are degrees in freedom (a rich person doesn't have to work at all if they don't feel like it), but when you're scouting for minimum wage jobs, you're at the lowest of those degrees.
We need to think about these problems in context of time, and the decisions made over time. A stork does not drop a baby off at your door, and a company does not accumulate/generate wealth overnight (although, companies are turning over more rapidly recently). We need to make sure the correct incentives/systems are in place to ensure healthy, decentralized, competition.
If that wasn't the case, a country could potentially change hugely from government to government, but most of what they do is small stuff, and all converge towards the benefits of corporations and mega-interests.
President Trump is keeping his campaign promises to reform lobbying[1], cracking down on illegal immigration[2], cracking down on ISIS[3], and he's making America no longer be the world's police officer[4].
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-sets-5-year-lifeti...
[2] http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/economy/sd-fi-b...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/15/us-mother-of-a...
[4] http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/donald-trump-congress-...
What constitutes third world squalor? Not many Americans are starving, having to make do without indoor plumbing, or spending 12 hours per day collecting firewood.
Heck, the U.S. "Has The Worst Rate Of Maternal Deaths In The Developed World"...
http://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/528098789/u-s-has-the-worst-ra...
I am debt-free, but have not yet managed to extract myself from this system. Health insurance is a big reason why.
Also, there are few part-time jobs that pay anything and although I have been attempting a career downshift, I can't find decent paying work. It's either I kill my body as a software developer and make decent money but work way too much, or I go be a $10/hr schmuck checkout clerk, I guess. I need that in between thing...but it's not there...on purpose.
If you are a half decent developer, there are tonnes of good paying software jobs with decent hours, it's probably one of the easiest high paying jobs in the world...
I think what you are celebrating on July 4 is that you have free speech, and are in such a good position that you are actually trying to downscale your career from one of the best careers in the world.
To solve that problem, let's eliminate all taxes for everyone making less than $100k. No income tax, no payroll tax, no property tax, no sales tax, no...
I don't have any reading material on it unfortunately, no. I'm mostly libertarian, so https://mises.org/ maybe?
[0] at the time, they used 'tyranny of the majority'
The notion that America is currently a functioning Democracy is still a bit up in the air for me. Americans in general have little factual policy knowledge, and for the few issues that do get fairly well covered there is a strong politicization which verges on propaganda.
More to the point - many political arguments that we see today in the national press usually has the strong cashflow backing of a few elite pocketbooks. It is likely impossible to run an apolitical cause for the public good.
If not for overwhelming politicization, is there another reason why so many US voters are basically anemic to political causes (e.g. wages, education, vacation, medical) which (in general) they could easily vote into law - but don't?
Anyway, just my opinion.
Gilens and Page[1]:
>>>What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
Some rebuttles:
>>> Bashir and Branham/Soroka/Wlezien find that on these 185 bills, the rich got their preferred outcome 53 percent of the time and the middle class got what they wanted 47 percent of the time. The difference between the two is not statistically significant.[2]
>>> The researchers found the rich’s win rate for economic issues where there's disagreement is 57.1 percent, compared with 51.1 percent for social issues. There's a difference, but not a robust one. "The win rates for the two issue types are not statistically different from one another," Branham, Soroka, and Wlezien conclude.[2]
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
[2] https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-...
Even in theory in a democracy, outcomes are not democratically chosen, actions (at some level, which may merely be choice of representative) are; therefore, those who have more resources to devote to understanding the relationship between actions and outcomes, and to understanding other actors preferred outcomes to craft propaganda tying preferred actions to other actors preferred outcomes will tend to get their preferred outcomes more often than others.
Fun fact: the US Constitution has exactly ZERO uses of the word "democracy" in it.
