30 Dollar Minimum Wage

What am I? A super-villain in a movie that you’ve just uncovered? :laughing:

I didn’t stumble, I stated a philosophical fact: in a deterministic universe, freedom does not and cannot exist.

This isn’t a moral statement about whether freedom “should” or “ought” to exist, it’s a statement that freedom does not and cannot exist whether or not you want it to. See the distinction? This seems to be the source of your misunderstandings, so I’m going to address it as a priority over all the other things you said (most of which was just repetition and often without further explanation anyway).

Consider two exhaustive types of decision: an intentional decision and an unintentional decision.

i) Intentional decisions are made consciously considering your prior experiences and your imaginings based on them: they are determined by these things and your thoughts and feelings about them - you are not “free” to base your decisions on anything other than these ingredients because you physically don’t have a conception of them upon which to base your conscious decision. This already determines an ultimate boundary to your unfreedom of choice.

Now, the strength of your preference one way or another within these bounds is going to determine what you choose. Your attitude to contrarianism is also restricted to these bounds, in case you’re the type to try and “test” your “free will”. It might feel like a close choice once you finally decide, or maybe you were pushed by forces outside of your control (and thus denied your freedom), but either way, your ultimate choice is neuro-chemically determined by which impulses fire most strongly in your brain: the state of your brain at the time of your decision, within the unfree bounds of your limited conception, biologically determines the choice you make.

The current state of your brain is in turn determined by previous states of your brain and decisions made in just the same way as above but in the past, all the way back to the beginning of your consciousness and ability to intentionally choose. Before that, the state of your brain was determined by things out of your control: you were not free to choose your genetics nor your environment - the interaction between which entirely determines the entirety of your behaviours.

Intentional decisions are not free in a deterministic universe.

ii) Unintentional decisions are even simpler, you don’t choose them any more than you choose to start the process of choosing in the first place. These decisions grip you unthinkingly, likewise determined by the state of your brain at the time of the decision, which is in turn determined by previous states of your brain all the way back to your initial conditions that you weren’t free to choose.

Unintentional decisions are also not free in a deterministic universe.
So you see… it is necessarily the case that freedom is an illusion.

But what is this illusion based upon?
We don’t “feel” unfree when we can’t fly without technology (assuming you’re not psychotic), because well-adjusted, reasonable and sane people don’t expect to be able to - we only feel unfree when we recognise that there are realistic conditions that could easily come about where we would be able to do the thing we wanted to do, but can’t. But even within our expectations, some restrictions still don’t “feel” like the kind unfreedoms of which you’re speaking e.g. if you are about to be attacked by a bear because you “freely” chose to put yourself in a situation where that might happen, you just do whatever you think is best to avoid harm in such a situation, given what you happen have at your disposal.

There has to be a human element in the way in order for us to feel like our freedoms have been infringed upon - it’s an emotion based on dominance hierarchies and nothing more. You are most free at the top and least free at the bottom.

As such, complete freedom in society would have to somehow require everybody to be at the top, which just means everyone is the same, which still doesn’t feel free. It’s an impossible goal. And even at the top, in order to hold your position you are bound to fend off competition, and in a market economy you must do this by catering for your customers: even the top are subject to the whims of others. The more people at the top, the less free they feel due to all the extra realistic competition imposed on them by others who seek to topple and replace you, and the more people at the bottom, the more free the top is and the more those at the bottom are subject to the whims of those at the top.

When you want more freedom, you are simply stating you want the opportunity for you to be higher up the hierarchy. No shit. The higher up we are, the more access we have to things we want - everyone wanted that already. Realistically, more capitalism means the top can get even freer at the expense of the bottom, and more socialism means the bottom don’t incur this expense quite so much because the top are hindered from climbing too high. Winners mean losers also exist, and a democracy (allegedly) takes into account all ranks in the hierarchy.

This doesn’t mean I think things “should” be this way, these are just facts.

Please tell me you understand and appreciate why the ideal of a more free society is bullshit now? You’ve been sold this ideology by people already at the top who want to get higher, which they can do by getting you to play their game that they’re more than likely to beat you at. “Flattery flattery flattery, I bet you could get rich too!” You even might. You’ll probably only climb minimally at best and make those already higher in the hierarchy climb even higher - you’re being played.

The only difference between societies that we regard as more or less free, is that the “less free” ones have a more visible and understandable human presence in how things are run. “More free” ones, are governed by much more vague and much less accountable forces, such as “the market”. But this is just an aggregate of the choices of those in economic power in exactly the same way as a dictatorship is an aggregate of the choices of those dictating things. At least the former is less centralised, so although we get less accountability, power is potentially more spread out. We get the benefit of more people having at least minimal power over the outcome that would otherwise solely be in the hands of a dictating few. But the controls and restrictions in play are just as present, even if they are more obscure and more complex - meaning many people don’t understand them or even know they are there (such as yourself).

In the interests of increasing freedom in this way (the only way that it ever could be said to be increasing) you really ought to be more of a historical materialist and recognise the shift away from less people being in power: from our old monarchies and aristocracies delegating to lords through the Feudal Age, further delegating power to business owners in our present Capitalist Age, through to delegating power even further to employees and so on into a Socialist Age.

The funny thing is I’m actually advocating pretty much the same thing as you, only I clearly understand it way better than you and others like you do.