I've commented before that Paul Graham and I share a lot of the same views, he just expresses them much better than I do.
Well, he's done it again with his latest What Business Can Learn from Open Source.
Just last week I was trying to explain in a comment on mnot's blog that:
large companies have far more in common with centrally planned socialism than free market capitalism
Well, Paul Graham basically says the same thing and he ties it in beautifully with blogging and writing open source software:
Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like commmunist states.
Whereas I stumbled to say:
People need to see themselves as individuals in the market rather than employees of corporations in the market.
Paul Graham says:
Nothing shows more clearly that employment is not an ordinary economic relationship than companies being sued for firing people. In any purely economic relationship you're free to do what you want. If you want to stop buying steel pipe from one supplier and start buying it from another, you don't have to explain why. No one can accuse you of unjustly switching pipe suppliers. Justice implies some kind of paternal obligation that isn't there in transactions between equals.Most of the legal restrictions on employers are intended to protect employees. But you can't have action without an equal and opposite reaction. You can't expect employers to have some kind of paternal responsibility toward employees without putting employees in the position of children. And that seems a bad road to go down.
My sentiments exactly.
Read the whole thing.