i have to admit that people who argue for a free market economy have some convincing points. I would like to believe in the concept but there are a few things that bug me about it. ITT convince me to embrace the free market.

The way I see it, a free market economy would have never fixed slavery, ever. This problem translates to non slavery issues as well. What stops a free market system from being just like America in the late-1800s/early-1900s with ridiculously low wages, long hours, and unsafe working conditions. It seems to me that a free market system easily sets up a situation where there are always people poor and desperate enough to take the place of someone that fights for a higher wage or a health number of working hours.

Also, people tend to say that the Republican Party embraces the free market but the way i see it they are far from it. The republican party is all about giving out tax breaks and incentives to lobbying corporations. Isn't the free market about eliminating these advantages given to certain companies and not to others? This means that it would be near impossible to elect people that would implement a truely free market because of the widespread corporate control of politics through election contributions and lobbying.

can someone clear these issues up for me?

Labor unions?

productivity growth?

Two important factors of free markets are choice and information. I would argue that in previous centuries, due to technological differences in communication and transportation, the free markets were not operating nearly at the level they could today. The death of monopsonistic employers is evidence of this I believe.

Well, there are people who want absolutely zero govt intervention, and then there are others who think the govt should only be there to enforce a bare minimum of laws. The main law being property rights. Property rights would include normal physical property as well as contract law and rights over oneself, thus making murder, assault, rape, slavery... illegal. So slavery should be illegal even under a very minimalist govt. Now we can get into how the free market would get rid of slavery, but I'd rather not go there, however for the other problems, here goes:

The long hours, low wages, and unsafe working conditions were due to one of a few reasons. Life sucked back then, there simply were not enough resources to go around to make everyone's life as good as it is today, because of technology. Before industrialization, people's lives were even worse, but when u worked ure own farm, there was no one to blame, but god. However, when u work at a factory, it's easy to blame your evil employer.

If factory owners are making large profits, because of the low wages, then there is nothing to stop another businessman from opening up a competing factory and stealing away the employees with higher wages. This process would continue until employees were being paid at the level at which they produce. ie if they can produce $5 an hour with of product, that is about what they will be payed, otherwise another factory will rise up and higher them. ie, if I can hire someone that makes me $5 an hour, but I only have to pay him $1 an hour, I'm raking it in and others will see this and copy my business until eventually the employees are making ~$5 an hour.

Everything is a tradeoff. As for safe working conditions and long hours, the employees choose these things. If they are faced with 2 employment options, 1) $5 an hour and safe working conditions, or 2)$8 an hour and unsafe conditions, they can choose whichever they feel is best for their life. Why must the govt force what they see as "best" for the employees. You might say, why can't the biz provide safe working conditions AND $8 an hour? Well, they're not going to have unsafe conditions just to be dicks, it costs money. The working conditions are just a part of the employment package offered to the employees. They will give the most to their employees through wages and working conditions while trying to minimize their costs at the same time. If they minimize costs too much, they will lose employees to competing businesses who can steal away the employees.


As for the republican party. I agree, they have not been good. Stop giving the govt more power to tax and have their special projects to dole out money to "fix" capitalism, and they will have no money to give out to contractors who have bought them off. Stop feeding the beast and they will have no money/power to be corrupt


Oops forgot to say. Life has gotten better, not because of govt intervention in the work force, but because of productivity advancement and real wealth generation that has lifted everyone up, not just the rich. And by the way, most rich are not born that way, they worked hard and provided many things to society, that is why people willingly gave them their money to buy their product.

Slavery was an institution supported and enforced by the government. Coerced labor is the opposite of a free market (hence "free").

What were American workers doing before they moved to factories and began working for "low wages, "long hours" in "unsafe working conditions"? They were working on farms, earning even lower wages for even longer hours. They made the choice to move to cities and work in factories because they wanted to.

This part is pretty much correct.

Pardon me and my lack of depth when it comes to this, but I have a question:

Is it possible to wind back the corruption and corporate control of politics? Is there any historical precedent for this?

revolution time

I don't know of any advocat of a free market that does not belive in self ownership. In a free market economy slavery is concidered ethically wrong because it violates property rights.

Correct (same for the Democratic party)

Correct. A free market doesn't need statist "leadership"

Shouldn't YOU be convincing ME why violent intervention is a good idea instead of the other way around?

if the market says people should be paid a low wage, thats what they should be paid. for example, opponents of the minimum wage argue that it destroys the equilibrium and actually increases unemployment since people that would be willing to work for $3/hr for example now cannot get jobs at all.

Doesn't the market want all factors of production, including labor, to be as cheap as possible?

Slavery doesn't work economically (if it did, I guess we'd live in a riddle, and free exchange wouldn't make sense anymore). Think about what happens when you take away someone's capacity to negotiate, express preference, seek alternatives, etc. He'll naturally do his job unproductively, right?

Joe down the street could offer him alternatives (better meals, less hours, preferred tasks.. as a start) and he'd likely get more productive use out of him by tapping into his initiative. The person's best contribution can be found in this equilibrium process of negotiation.

When state courts universally recognize people with black skin as property and less than human and make it illegal for them to seek alternatives, it props up all this ineffective (and morally abhorrent) activity, and it's hard for me to imagine how it could possibly arise as a market solution.

Yes, people that want labor want it to be as cheap as possible in the same way that people providing labor want it to be as expensive as possible. However, there is an equilibrium between the two in which both parties are happy. That's why markets work.

It is not self-evident to me that a mutually satisfactory equilibrium will always be reached.

What if producers collude to suppress the price of labor?

private regulatory agencies that arent funded by state money would take care of things like anti-trust if i understand the anarcho-capitalist position correctly.

edit: also, the current system addresses your concerns, but would you argue that a mutually satisfactory state of equilibrium has been reached?

How does a private agency get jurisdiction to bust a trust?

If by "satisfactory" you mean the present exchange remains more or less constant given available alternatives, then yes. On the other hand, no. I'm not really sure how to answer that since there are a lot of subjective factors.

What if consumers collude to suppress the price of goods/services?

mutually satisfactory, not satisfactory.

to your first question, i dont really know, but here's a youtube video explaining the situation a bit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYTgwzHU6xg

Only some do. I for one don't think an equilibrium exists due to the existance of time and uncertainty but can still oppose minimum wage laws.
Thankfully there are entrepreneurs trying to move the system closer to equilibrium at all times for the benefit of society

Market failure. Now answer mine.

In that case, probably yes, since the transactions actually take place.

A problem I see with this "reaching an equilibrium" idea is that it requires employees to be organized in every industry at all times. For example, I had a job at a movie theater in high school. The movie theater paid us about minimum wage with about 40 employees averaging maybe 20 hours a week and did not pay the 6 managers a lot. At the end of Q3 of the year the theater had made about 1.5 million in profit that year. This is after all expenses and wages paid. Clearly the amount paid to employees is not enough to match what the corporate owners got out of their work. Clearly the employees could get together and fight for higher pay or more benefits(couldn't even get free popcorn, just free movie tickets on weekdays). However, most of the employees are high school students and would not organize if they could and there are always more high school students to take their place.

Another example would be the plague on almost every field in america that is the "internship." For some reason it is accepted by almost every recent college graduate that they will have to work for free for a summer or longer in order to "get their foot in the door." Because most companies require experience before hiring you or jobs are so scarce that only people with experience will get hired, it is an industry wide standard in some fields that you must work for free for a while to even be eligible to be paid. If you do not think this is right, there's always someone that will put up with it because everyone is desperate to get a job in the field that they majored in rather than working as a waiter in a restaurant. Maybe this internship thing is just a rant by me and is part of reaching the equilibrium, but it seems that you are doing something that has value to a company but are not getting paid because these companies are controlling the amount of jobs and forcing people to either work for free for a period of time or go into a different line of work.

But my main point is that because the elites hold the power, the burden is on the workers to stay organized and constantly fight for better wages rather than the two sides mutually looking for this equilibrium

So your idea of a "market failure" is when no one will buy your product for x amount of dollars? So if you produce and sell dictionaries for $5000 and no one agrees to buy them, that's a "market failure?" lol

To answer your question, there is no evidence of firms fixing prices in a free market. So it's all a game of "what ifs." What if hot dogs cost $500 in a free market? What if there were no black shoelaces in a free market? After all, without a government mandate how can anything get done?

It just doesn't make sense for a group of producers or consumers to "collude." What does it accomplish? Why would I care if you bought a new laptop or not?

How does it even work? Do you try to convince everyone else to stop producing and earning money so prices will go up? Do you entice everyone at the store not to buy Heinz ketchup so they will have to lower the price to your level? Do you see how unrealistic and out of touch you are?

You are just being arrogant here. Just because you think internships and $6/hr jobs are unfair and unjust doesn't mean millions of others agree. Why should someone who is happy to earn $6/hr be unable to pursue that wage?

If it was as simple as higher wages=higher standard of living then why wouldn't we just mandate a wage of $500 per hour per person? Clearly there are more people who disagree with your theory that "min wage is too low," otherwise why would people accept jobs at that wage? You realize that the only reason employers can "get away" with "only paying $6/hr" is because there are plenty of other workers willing and able to do the same job for that rate. Why do you think A-Rod makes $30m a year? If there were 50000 other power hitting shortstops who can attract fans how much would he make?

That's kind of my point. They are willing to work for such a low wage because they have to in order to put food on the table. What you are saying is that workers are competing with other workers to reach an equilibrium where they can get paid enough to scrape by and still be able to get a job. So instead of trying to reach an the equilibrium between employee and employer, the potential employees are just fighting amongst themselves for jobs, resulting in a very low standard of living and increasing the gap between elites and the working class. I know free market believers are not really concerned with distribution of wealth, but it seems that the increasing gap between the wealthy and the poor makes it increasingly harder to reach the equilibrium.