The Wrongness Of Volunteering

The volunteer is celebrated for his and her selflessness. In this world they need to exist, so much would not work without the input of volunteers. But what is a volunteer but a volunteer slave. We like to think of volunteers as contributing to the economy, but in many ways, they perpetuate communism and distort market values. Surely, the nurse who cares for the sick and dying has value. Even housewives have economic value, but only when doing the same work she does at home, for strangers. In this essay we do not say volunteers are not needed. We argue that any economy that needs volunteers or which cannot pay people for the work they do, is not much of an economy. If the market cannot at minimum pay for the work done, it has lost the right to exist.