>So, to the higher ups, they were still able to hire. Did they eventually decide this was a disadvantage, and try to rectify it? Or did they not change?

I was the higher-up. I couldn't afford a full benefit package and decided to try the market and see who would work without them. The answer was "only people who didn't have the option". I hired two of those people instead.

I would've liked to hire someone with 20 weeks of parental leave and a full benefits package, but it was the second hire in a bootstrapped consulting company. I had to lay them off after about 14 months when two of our major clients ran out of money at about the same time (we mainly consulted with startups, obviously a bad market). I got hired by a client full-time about 2 months after that.

So yes, it was a real disadvantage, and yes, it would've been nice to rectify it. I just didn't have the cashflow for that.

>Having to pay rent and buy food are definitely huge burdensome constraints. Hence, most of this "If you don't like it, you don't have to work there!" is ignoring much of that, and reality.

Those are real-world survival constraints, not artificial government-imposed constraints. The government can't just wave a magic wand and make everything in the world free and automatic. That's been tried before and that blatant denialism results in stunning evil and poverty. The organic market that allows real-world risk and reward to be passed through with minimal artificial influence is the only system that functions reasonably well.

The people of the country do not owe you a ticket to free rent. The government's role is to not make sure that everyone is rewarded or even that everyone survives. Your prosperity is now and always will be your responsibility. The difference is that in a socialist system, that prosperity is almost impossible to attain. In our system, opportunity is everywhere for the people who want to stop whining and go out and take advantage of it.

>Do you honestly think that this kind of benefit is something that should only be reserved for someone who is lucky enough to be in a good bargaining position?

I honestly think that this kind of benefit is not something that should be forced, and it's not something that's owed, just as a job isn't owed. You have to earn these things. You have to convince someone that they need to give them to you in exchange for something else you're going to give them. I really don't understand the rules of the world you're envisioning here. Everyone should just get whatever they want because they want it? That's simply not how reality works, and it's not how it's ever going to work, even in the most ideal conditions. There must be a functioning risk-reward system or the whole thing falls apart with stunning rapidity.

>Not to me. But then there are many things I don't believe should be dependent on where one works, or how good they are at bargaining.

Personally, I think it's quite frightening that you believe that you should have the authority to force everyone in the country to do what you think should be done. That's not freedom, it's dictatorship. We only use force and compulsory means when an action threatens our social structure's fundamental operations. Everything else must be allowed to prosper or decline on its own merit, and we must allow people to do things we don't personally agree with, or the system doesn't work.

The scary part is that when most people have the perspective you're sharing, when the respect for competition and the ability of each individual as a sovereign and independent actor to make his own choices and prosper or fail by them is gone, that's when freedom is crushed. It takes a society that truly respects these principles to secure the kind of government we've enjoyed in the US for the last 200+ years, and I fear more and more that as a society, we're losing that. And once we lose it culturally, it's just a few short years until the politics follows.