General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I'm from the south. [View all]rrneck
(17,671 posts)Liberals can certainly invest in financial instruments and property. We can barter for goods and services, an idea that has great appeal for me. Liberals can even have housekeepers, gardeners and all sorts of help. There's nothing wrong with that. But the various social and economic activities in which one engages are only one factor in the equation.
So what's the difference between bartering and sharecropping? Context. When a landlord uses the prevailing economic conditions to demand more work from the tenant than they should because of a down economy or a housing shortage bartering becomes sharecropping. And that same callous landlord won't have to worry about the housekeeper trying to renegotiate for a different pay arrangement because s/he knows the housekeeper is an "independent contractor" and can be easily replaced without notice in our free market libertarian utopia. It all depends on how the person with the power wants to act. The hypocrisy happens when liberals act like conservatives when it comes to money, and liberals when it comes to appearances. You can drive a Prius and never use the "N" word and still be an asshole.
The point is that people are going to make mistakes no matter who they are. There are good landlords and employers and bad ones. That's just people doing what people do. It's not a question of ideological compliance but of ethics. I think it's a huge mistake to confuse the two because it's unwise to assume any given ideology is a priori ethical. When we begin to assume that we turn over control of our ethics to those who design the ideology.