If someone's work is worth much more than they are being paid, the textbook says that in a free society a competing business has an incentive to profit by luring the worker away from the current employer with a higher wage. Here is a slightly modified version of istara's statement: "If your skills were valuable enough to be worth paying for, someone would be willing to pay for them." In this form the statement is not merely true, but tautological. How else would we know your skills are valuable except that someone is willing to pay for them? Surely not simply because some outsider who is not willing to employ you says so. None of this guarantees that any particular worker maximizes their potential income, any more than a given business necessarily maximizes profit. In a free society workers have the opportunity to maximize their income, by selling their labor at the best price they can get. [N.b. by "paid" I mean "compensated financially or otherwise."]Really? Isn't that why we outlawed slavery?
Someone around here said that slavery was outlawed because the most basic human right is the right of self-determination. Not simply because slavery is unpaid.