You’d also have to watch an animal in nature for a pretty long time to find it even giving another animal a second’s thought…

Anyway, the ubiquity and naturalness of competition don’t mean it doesn’t suck. Am I not allowed to say I don’t like rain just because it rains all the time? Am I not allowed to propose an umbrella?

In fact, my wife and I were having this very discussion the other day on her cousin, who just signed up for food stamps. She gets $400/month for food for her fat self and her kid. She is gainfully employed and also drives a much nicer car than we do. When she went shopping with my wife, she saw the handful of coupons and generic brand groceries that in my wife’s cart and asked “why do you do all that.” After all, on $400/month for two people, you can get a full cart full-priced name brand groceries every trip to the store.
In the end, however, my wife and I succeed in keeping our small business open and in paying our bills every month (BARELY right now), and our pride in personal responsibility and our inner competitive drive for self-reliance keeps us off the gubmint’s dole. Maybe that makes us suckers, but I’d rather take a job shoveling shit on the graveyard shift than depend on someone else to provide for my wife and kid. I think it’s what being a man and a libertarian is all about.

Really? Then you might as well swallow a bullet today, because (excepting religious dogma) competition is the essence of life. Not just human life, ALL life.
If not to compete, Noumenon, why do you wake up every day?
How have you obtained your education? Companionship? Income?
Next time you find yourself in a situation where you can observe nature, take a minute to really observe the way animals interact. It is ALL centered around competition. Even domesticated animals still have quirky instinctive habits tied to competitive vigor.

Employers compete for employees and employees compete for employers.

There is a strong belief in this country that an employee is just a powerless little man who can never get a good deal for himself, who is always getting screwed over. So we create minimum wage laws and the FLSA and give oftimes give unions the backing of law enforcement in negotiations. All this does is help those who work enjoy a decent wage at the expense of marginal producers and increased prices for all goods.

But it does have benefits for government since we can take the earnings of those working and redistribute it to those who can not. Whole bunch of jobs “created” managing this.

It’s just human nature that someone who is not an exempt employee, might come to think being exempt sucks. Just the way exempt employees think being hourly sucks, and Taliban think being American sucks, and jocks think being a nerd sucks. Everybody thinks their own way is best. Including you, obviously.

It’s better that way; otherwise, those of us who are going to be doing low level work for years and years would dislike it all those years — but most don’t.

So I guess what I’m saying is it’s very easy for me to see the upside of allowing the worker to offer to work more hours one day and fewer the next. It’s not so easy for me to see the upside of allowing the worker to offer to work for less money and longer hours with no pay.

I guess that’s because of my limited perspective; if I were an employer, it would be easy to imagine my company being forced to offer flex time to everyone because some people wanted it. Since I’m just an employee, that didn’t loom as large as the idea of an employee being forced to work unpaid because other employees would do it.