Comment by WorldMaker
20 days ago
It is sad how many allegedly and vocally "free market" capitalists don't actually want a liquid and free labor market. The shame is that most of them also don't know what "free market" technically means anymore.
20 days ago
It is sad how many allegedly and vocally "free market" capitalists don't actually want a liquid and free labor market. The shame is that most of them also don't know what "free market" technically means anymore.
“Free market” means freedom to exploit resources without government oversight. It’s not in any way related to fairer labor regulations (those are usually undesirable for free market absolutists, by definition)
That's a fun "modern" twisted definition intentionally skewed from how Adam Smith, among others, would define "free market":
> For classical economists such as Adam Smith, the term free market refers to a market free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities.
Employer-defined healthcare creates troughs of economic privilege, builds monopolies with respect to laborers, and enforces artificial scarcity in the supply of labor. It removes liquidity in the labor market if laborers aren't free to bid their labor to the highest bidder at any time simply because they can't risk their own health care. It's not a "free market" determined "solely" by supply and demand when the supply is artificially limited by the rent seeking inherent to employer-defined healthcare, no matter whether or not you think the solution is fairer labor regulations or how much you claim to hate government oversight. That's a market failure.
A free market is maximally competitive. The giant corporations of today are planned economies run to maximize returns to shareholders by eliminating competition.
Shareholder return is not a free market function, in fact for most businesses it’s in the interest of the shareholder to have zero competition, as competitive forces require expenditure in labor and dollars to improve the product at lower margin.
Apple is the best consumer example of this. In segments where there are no competitive forces, say Mac displays, they ship high margin, mediocre products for an extended lifecycle. You can buy a shitty LG for half the price of a mediocre Apple model. The same thing happened in the pre-retina cheap MacBook Air - that thing lived 3 years too long because where else are you gonna go?
What’s not “free” about the PC display market? Who’s preventing competition on it?
No one said anything about “fairer labor regulations”, only a “free and liquid market in labor”. Free movement of labor is, as much as free movement of goods and capital, a component of a free market. Restrictions on labor movement are market restrictions which make a market non-free.
A free and liquid market in labor has some overlap with what people concerned with fairer labor market regulations want, but in other areas is diameteically opposed to what they want.
Free markets are unrealizable abstractions that lots of people like to appeal to vaguely, but very few consistently favor as more than a rhetorical device.
So the only entities who might contribute to a less free market are governments? Nobody else?
I think they do know and that's why they don't want it.
Very few people seem to understand what a free market is, although it is very clear what it is.