You may not know this but you are touching a very sensitive issue.
Which is better for the country: asking people to employ domestic workers, or have higher unemployment?
Let's take South Africa, which I know better than any place in Asia. There's high unemployment. The government encourages people to hire domestic workers. Checking now the rates are about US$ 1/hour. These are maids/domestics, gardeners, childminders, caretakers for the sick and elderly, and so on.
I grew up on the US, and from my family learned a strong moral principle that it's best to do everything yourself, rather than have 'people cater to my every need' at home. As an adult, I followed that same moral principle.
Then I bought a house. With a garden. A quite beautiful garden that I wanted to keep. I couldn't do it myself. More importantly, my rates as a software developer were more than 8x that of a gardener. I fought that moral training and realized that it's little different than regularly going to a mechanic to maintain my car.
The position of the South African government is similar. If you have the money, then why not use it to hire people to help around the house? Living in South Africa for a short time, I learned about some of the advantages of having someone who would do laundry, including ironing, sweeping, or mowing the lawn. None are tasks I enjoy.
As you (and the essayist) point out, that's fraught with difficulties. At what point does that turn into a sense of entitlement? How can abuses in the workplace (that is, the home) be monitored and reduced?
The solution of course is higher taxation or philanthropy. The gardener should be paid to build a public garden, not private garden.
You should be paying someone who is more efficient than you at those tasks, so you can write software to solve problems more efficiently than your customers do otherwise. That is wealth creation across a community.
You should not be paying someone (x N) to work at a much lower hourly wage than you simply because you have accumulated more wealth.
Now, some dose of income inequality is healthy, to motivate individuals to better themselves and be valuable (education, skill, physical execise), but extreme inequality is to be remedied by rebalancing the income, not just making someone work for you.
"The solution of course is higher taxation or philanthropy."
I don't see the "of course." Using that argument, it sounds like I shouldn't hire a carpenter to work on my house but should instead pay more taxes so that the carpenter can work on improving the public buildings, and only use my own skills and time to improve my house.
I shouldn't ever hire a mechanic to fix my car but rather I should always pay more taxes in order to fund the mass transit system.
I shouldn't ever hire a gardener but should rather let the existing garden in my yard fall into disrepair - or learn the skills myself - in preference for a neighborhood garden.
"You should not be paying someone (x N) to work at a much lower hourly wage than you simply because you have accumulated more wealth."
I never held that position, and I don't know how you inferred that that I had that assumption in mind.
There is some boundary on where it's better for myself and/or the community that I do something myself, and better sometimes for others with more time and/or better skills to do it. My argument is that one of the reasons that people don't hire domestic help is because of moral qualms. Sometimes those qualms are unfounded, and in that case, an educational campaign to change attitudes may be an appropriate means to mollify those qualms and improve wealth creation across a community.
In your words, they are doing something less efficiently than they could, and need a reminder backed by a good argument for why they should hire someone else to handle those jobs.
"simply because you have accumulated more wealth"
That is part of a different argument. The mathematics I outlined are based on differential income, not wealth accumulation. That is, had I spent every penny of income or contributed it through taxes, such that I had less wealth accumulation than my gardener, it would still make economic sense for me to hire a gardener instead of tending to the garden myself. As you said, your goal is 'wealth creation across a community'. The scenarios I described are not incompatible with that goal. I can outline others if you wish.
Also, at that time my work was very bursty. I would sometimes visit a client site for a month or two, then not work for a few months. Her work was relatively constant, so she could maintain my garden while I was away. Even if I maintained the garden myself, I don't think it would be morally or economically objectionable to hire someone for that case. It can be even be worthwhile to hire someone on a continual basis, in order to ensure availability during odd times.
My own worry isn't so much about employing domestic workers per se, as about which kinds of power relations result from it. If it's just an exchange of services for a fee, that's fine. You can sell some hours of programming as a freelancer, and that's not particularly objectionable.
The domestic-help arrangement often seems to end up with weird power dynamics, though, where it's more like having a "servant" who is clearly of lower social status, and is supposed to cater to their employers' whims in some kind of old-fashioned aristocratic style. Feels less like "freelancing" and more like something more problematic.
Which is better for the country: asking people to employ domestic workers, or have higher unemployment?
Let's take South Africa, which I know better than any place in Asia. There's high unemployment. The government encourages people to hire domestic workers. Checking now the rates are about US$ 1/hour. These are maids/domestics, gardeners, childminders, caretakers for the sick and elderly, and so on.
I grew up on the US, and from my family learned a strong moral principle that it's best to do everything yourself, rather than have 'people cater to my every need' at home. As an adult, I followed that same moral principle.
Then I bought a house. With a garden. A quite beautiful garden that I wanted to keep. I couldn't do it myself. More importantly, my rates as a software developer were more than 8x that of a gardener. I fought that moral training and realized that it's little different than regularly going to a mechanic to maintain my car.
The position of the South African government is similar. If you have the money, then why not use it to hire people to help around the house? Living in South Africa for a short time, I learned about some of the advantages of having someone who would do laundry, including ironing, sweeping, or mowing the lawn. None are tasks I enjoy.
As you (and the essayist) point out, that's fraught with difficulties. At what point does that turn into a sense of entitlement? How can abuses in the workplace (that is, the home) be monitored and reduced?
You can read some of the difficulties and different viewpoints at http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/473.1 .