Working for a living

Let us assume most people have a goal of not dying. People will take whatever steps they deem necessary to accomplish this goal.

People need certain things to survive: food, water, shelter, clothing, energy, medical care. They also need secondary things that help us get their primary needs: education, transport, communication. Lots of thing-needing going on.

We live in at a pretty nice point in history. The things people need to survive exist in the world! This is much better than the alternative, where we have to actually create what we need. (Admittedly some people still do that, but they're outside the scope of this article.) Since our survival needs are owned by someone, survival is simply a question of effecting the transfer of these things. There are three basic ways of doing this:

1) Steal. Someone gives you what you need involuntarily. This could be burglary, fraud, looting, war, or other forms of theft.

2) Trade. Someone gives you what you need voluntarily, in exchange for something else they want. This includes shopping, barter, and labor.

3) Gift. Someone gives you what you need voluntarily, with nothing in exchange. This includes charity and government welfare, though government welfare includes some involuntary aspects.

All people do some combination of these three things to achieve continued survival.

First, we want to avoid theft, if nothing else because it's destabilizing to society. If theft is endemic, it forces everyone who isn't stealing to spend additional resources on security, which are resources spent not making the world better. We try to dis-incentivize theft through punishment. But no matter what punishment scheme you put in place, people will steal if they can't get what they need to survive, either through trade or gift. Thus, to prevent theft and maximize overall efficiency, we must make sure that survival is otherwise achievable through trade or gifts.

First, we consider trade. The overwhelming majority of humans have exactly one thing to trade: labor. We work, and in exchange we obtain things we need. Our labor has a value, and our survival needs have a value. The ratio of these determines how many hours one must work to survive. This number will vary from person to person, year to year, and place to place.

But what if that ratio gets out of whack? What if the typical person needs to work fifty hours to survive? Seventy? Ninety? If the number of labor-hours required to survive is more than a typical person can supply, if the cost of living goes up or the value of labor goes down too far, it becomes literally impossible to work for a living.

(Now, I am not presently arguing that this has occurred today, here, or at any other time or place. I am simply pointing out the boundary conditions of our present system.)

Supposing this occurs, and that we still want people to not turn to theft, we have a few options:

1) Make labor worth more than its market value. This can be done with minimum wage laws, or with the artificial creation of new jobs.

2) Make cost of living less than its market value. This can be done with price controls, or with subsidization of survival needs.
3) Decouple cost of living from labor. Give people their survival needs whether they've earned them or not.

None of these are free-market solutions; all are some form of government intervention. From this, we have an inescapable conclusion: the free market only leads to a stable society as long as people can earn a living. Once the cost of living exceeds the labor available to an individual, for whatever reason, government intervention is required to preserve stability.

Of course, that leaves trivial details like when and how...