On the rare occasions when I've heard people talk against volunteer work, their underlying issue was jobs. If forty hours a week of necessary and valuable work could be done by a handful of volunteers in their spare time or by a person getting paid a living wage, then obviously the latter was better. It removed a person from the dole. It gave that person money to spend, thus stimulating the economy. It tightened up the labor market by a tiny bit, increasing the advantage held by employees, collectively, over employers. I remember one case in which the volunteer was a man who was wealthy enough to work full time for free and was, furthermore, uniquely qualified. The work he was doing couldn't have been socialized and turned into a paying job for somebody who needed one because only he could do it. Nevertheless he got some grief for working for free. His critics feared that his example would inspire a trend.
Did any of the anti-volunteer-work Swedes and Finns you talked to express anything like this sentiment?
They didn't. It's the broken windows fallacy — Bastiat, 1850. Money not spent on a salary doesn't vanish; it circulates through other channels. No net value is created by requiring a paid position to exist. The version your commenter is running just swaps in humans as the windows: people need to be in a degraded state (unemployed, on the dole, precarious) so that hiring them registers as creation rather than redirection. The fallacy expressed in meat.
On the rare occasions when I've heard people talk against volunteer work, their underlying issue was jobs. If forty hours a week of necessary and valuable work could be done by a handful of volunteers in their spare time or by a person getting paid a living wage, then obviously the latter was better. It removed a person from the dole. It gave that person money to spend, thus stimulating the economy. It tightened up the labor market by a tiny bit, increasing the advantage held by employees, collectively, over employers. I remember one case in which the volunteer was a man who was wealthy enough to work full time for free and was, furthermore, uniquely qualified. The work he was doing couldn't have been socialized and turned into a paying job for somebody who needed one because only he could do it. Nevertheless he got some grief for working for free. His critics feared that his example would inspire a trend.
Did any of the anti-volunteer-work Swedes and Finns you talked to express anything like this sentiment?
They didn't. It's the broken windows fallacy — Bastiat, 1850. Money not spent on a salary doesn't vanish; it circulates through other channels. No net value is created by requiring a paid position to exist. The version your commenter is running just swaps in humans as the windows: people need to be in a degraded state (unemployed, on the dole, precarious) so that hiring them registers as creation rather than redirection. The fallacy expressed in meat.
Completely agree. Antoine St Exupery wrote about this too, in Flight to Arras.