Fortunately, both of these positions are wrong. 

• On the one hand, the free market’s most vocal supporters tend to ignore the finer points of free market theory, like the part about how free markets tend towards a diminution of rents, and how profits accrue to all factors of production.
• On the other hand, opponents imagine more “freedom” only for the exploiters. They believe that “free markets” means that you are justified to do whatever you want as long as you can get away with it, and unable to imagine any alternative to the status quo, they often conclude that a free market will be worse in every way (unless you’re among that 1%).

The opponents are right to believe in this Wild West caricature because it’s exactly what will happen if you start gutting the social safety net without doing anything to fix the underlying problems. Whether unknowingly, the free market advocates ‘rhetoric is ultimately perceived as either justifying, or apologizing for, the status quo: they talk plainly about gutting social safety nets, with nary a mention of the underlying inequalities that make them necessary!

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to show people what they can’t see.

Another world is possible

Opponents often point to the present, and say “Look at the free market failing…”. Except, it’s not a free market. And it doesn’t become one just because you call it that. Then again, the proponents usually don’t have a response to this, other than parroting some “invisible hand” argument about how the market will magically self-regulate if only you get rid of all the regulations, first. But it also doesn’t magically become a free market if you haphazardly start stripping away regulations, either.

So both parties are working on a flawed model of what constitutes a free market.

Discourse, not Dogma

And although there is something to the “invisible hand” argument, it kinda sorta presupposes a free market in the first place. It is not a trump card and you can’t just pull it out every time someone challenges your position.  If you don’t do anything to remedy the “too big to fail”, if you don’t do anything to remedy the “captured regulators” or the “lobbyists”, etc., you’ve created a free market in name only, which is NOT a free market.

these guys have no place in a truly free market

It’s not sufficient to just take away those things that interfere with a free market if you intend to leave in place all of the benefits (and handicaps) accrued under the old system of exploitation. You can’t leave untouched all of the institutional inefficiencies, corruptions, cronyism, all the accrued benefits from years or decades of favoritism & protectionism, etc., and expect the market to function at all like a truly free market.

An Example

I hope to demonstrate that the removal of the immediate condition is not sufficient to cure the accumulated injustices of centuries of abuse and subjugation. Sometimes it is easy to illustrate a point by way of example; consider the aftermath of the Civil War:

The institution of chattel slavery essentially dissolves overnight but the plantation owners keep their plantations, their fancy lifestyles, their estates, acres of land and livestock. Freed slaves were left with virtually nothing (since all that was theirs had previously been denied them). So the freed slaves end up as sharecroppers or very poorly paid workers — essentially slaves — having nothing with which to bargain but their labor, they are compelled by hunger to exchange their labor for whatever pittance their former masters will offer.  Thus, injustice continues in a slightly different form

See where I’m going with this?

It is indisputably wrong for someone to argue that this outcome is the fault of the free market.

It is also indisputably wrong for a free market advocate to suggest that this is the natural result of a free market.

Yet almost every discussion of “free markets” centers around these two obviously and irrevocably incorrect assumptions.

They claim is that the workers have helped shape and define the job, its responsibilities and reward, etc., and as a result they have a legitimate claim to it.You can certainly interpret this argument as a form of homesteading and at a glance it is compelling.

Is it valid though? I’m not sure. I see two major flaws with the argument.

1. Assumes that because conditions once prevailed which justified a certain compensation, that those laborers are forever after entitled to that same level of compensation.
2. An unhealthy fetish for “high” wages, which I would probably attribute more to the psychology of capitalism than to genuine worker-owners in a free market.

Regarding #1, this assertion is intuitively bullshit because when a product or service is no longer (as) valuable or necessary, it ceases to command the same remuneration. For example, if medicine could cure all ailments and diseases, a Doctor’s services qua Doctor would no longer be valuable or necessary to society.

As for the canard of high wages… The problem is that high wages are indicative of scarcity, rather than abundance, and attempts to artificially preserve high prices inevitably result in the destruction of, rather than the accumulation of material wealth. The objective ought not be “high wages” but rather a high standard of living. Do not conflate the two. In a free market, prices fall as abundance (i.e., wealth) is created. Therefore it is not necessarily undesirable for prices (including) wages to fall, in fact we should expect prices to fall over time because that means that humanity is creating more wealth and abundance than they are consuming.

The union may claim “These jobs are ours. We have worked for them and made them what they are. We deserve them,” and I’m sympathetic to this position, but I think it is more of a knee-jerk reaction to try and justify one’s existence within the capitalist system, rather than a bullet-proof argument.

This post is more of brainstorming than actual argument, and I value your contributions, so echo any thoughts, comments, feedback, below.

If the unions are meant to be a counterweight to state-granted corporate privilege, the proper recourse is repeal, revoke, or nullify all the privileges in order to facilitate the the liquidation and distribution of the wealth they have amassed**. Whether this distribution may be achieved to some degree through the state’s legal apparatus is suspect, since the “law” is the capitalists’ primary instrument of oppression.

Although I am sympathetic to many labor causes, and not opposed to their means, I have reservations about their efficacy in achieving desired results.  As an equality of means brings about equality of opportunity, the real challenge is to equalize the means and I’m not convinced this happens.

• If successful in “seizing”, the largest unions would control the “means of production”, employed thereafter for the benefit of themselves. They may be tempted to restrict membership to ensure higher wages, and by restricting membership, the union controls access to the means of production in much the same way that the capitalist-owner does: keeping employment safely out of reach for many.
• Since all means of production are collectively held, a dissatisfied member can’t just walk off on his own because he can’t take his “share” of the cooperative capital when he leaves. Nor can he, or a group of others decide they are unhappy with the union’s stewardship, they probably can’t instigate a micro-”strike” and claim the product of their labor, or a homestead right to a share of the collective assets.
• The individuals would be in a position much like the majority who live hand-to-mouth today: bound to the occupation by the necessity of hunger.  And if they choose to leave, they would leave with nothing***  whereupon they would ascertain that the only thing they have to negotiate with is their own labor power; they would be at the mercy of others.

On the contrary, in a free society with the means more-or-less distributed, the average man being unhappy with his station should have options:

If he has acted wisely and put some money away, if there is freedom to buy, sell, loan and borrow, he should have the financial wherewithal take some modest risks: he can go off on his own or join with co-workers and form a competing enterprise or start a new one altogether. Or he may choose to work for someone else; since there would be no workplace large enough or economically powerful enough to exert appreciable pressure on the markets for goods or for labor. In short there should be plenty of opportunities one could pursue.

What I hope we may one day obtain is an environment where no sector of the economy (including labor) is dominated by oligopoly.

I am all for abolishing the current order of things, but I do not want to simply put the power in another party’s hands (no matter which flag they’re waving). Instead I want to abolish that concentration of power which is so easily abused.

*  I am not suggesting  there is anything inherently wrong with labor organizations. Nor am I arguing against tactics advocated by labor organizations like the IWW (direct action, “If you need a break, take one”, etc.) nor am I fundamentally opposed sabotage, etc. If you want to argue for a syndic or a co-op of a dozen people or so who have a small shop and manage that endeavor “collectively”, be my guest. I am absolutely not debating that.
** In order to make an omelet you have to break some eggs. This is probably going to be a messy process.
*** Barring of course, any prior arrangements which may provide for severance pay, or other remuneration based on length of service, etc.

If we get rid of the onerous taxes on the middle class, the regressive taxes that disadvantage the poor, the myriad regulations which hamstring businesses (the right-libertarian does not qualify, but the left-libertarian will probably refine the definition to include “small business, cooperatives, etc. in lieu of capital-intensive, oligopolistic industry) we’ll all be richer.

Depending on the degree of “libertarian” you’re dealing with they may add optional conditions like:

And just for Karma points, let’s stop dropping bombs on kids in Pakistan and funding death squads in South America, and you know what else, it doesn’t really matter if we put another man on the moon…

I’m with you so far [1].  But the argument concludes that we just axe all this stuff and your net income goes up, voila you are richer and then this becomes some sort of justification for the “free market”.

Wrong.

If you are going to be better-off in a free market, it’s not simply because you’ll be “earning more money”.

It ain’t about that 10% or 20% that Uncle Sam takes out of your paycheck every week.

Your nominally “higher” income isn’t going to matter much [2]. There will certainly be discomfort in the short- to medium-term as generations of capital misallocation are revealed all at once. But prices, like water, eventually find their level. So, the fact that you might have “more” money is probably not going to matter.

Nor is it about the paltry few cents that you pay for dozens of programs you probably vociferously oppose, (e.g., public health clinics, welfare for displaced/redundant labor force, mass transit, free birth control for high school kids or low-income people, crappy artwork in public places, etc.) but in the grand scheme of things don’t amount to a hill of beans.

If your primary objection is that the government is ripping you off a few cents on every dollar that you earn, if your strongest talking point is simply, “Well, we could all be richer”, don’t act surprised when people look at you like some bougie sonofabitch who’s just using the rhetoric of “liberty” in order to appeal to that me-vs-the-world selfishness with which you’ve been indoctrinated since kindergarten.

So this is a terrible argument: not only is it objectively incorrect, but it relies on gross exaggerations (if we stopped paying welfare – of course without examining or addressing the root causes of the poverty in society, we’d be richer!), and also because it espouses the very worst aspects of consumerism.

What matters in a free market is the opportunities which freedom presents.

In my estimation it is these intangible effects of such a shake-up that will really improve everyone’s lot in the long-run.

Deep down inside I’d like to believe that we all want freedom, security, a modicum of material comfort, leisure time to spend recreating and enjoying with our friends and families. Money-blind, though, so many have been brainwashed in to believing that these “luxuries” can only be purchased, and the price is perpetual labor & toil to make ends meet and provide for the occasional escape. But that ain’t freedom, and it ain’t security[3] either.  It’s a very, very poor substitute at best.

Imagine the freedom to enjoy your life. Real equality of opportunity. The wherewithal to carve your own destiny, rather than trying desperately scrambling to fit perfectly in to some cookie-cutter pre-fab box that’s been forced in front of you like you’re the next interchangeable and totally replaceable piece rolling down the assembly line of life. And if everyone else could do the same? especially if the poorest & least-fortunate among us could substantially improve their lots as well?

The most important part about a free market is not that you will make more money (because you probably won’t, but that won’t even matter!). It’s the freedom, stupid! It’s working within a society, shaping those institutions which foster the freedom, security and well-being which is what we all really want (not that bullshit illusion of prosperity known as “The American Dream^TM“); a world where it doesn’t take 50+ hours of nose-to-the-grindstone or mind-numbing, paper-pushing, rubber-fucking-stamping “labor” to provide for your family, all the while barely making ends meet.

You can’t buy freedom. And you can’t really replace it.  Understand that freedom contributes to real wealth, not the other way around, and that we need to be working towards freedom as an end in itself and not towards monetary wealth as some proxy or substitute for what we really deserve.

1. Setting aside the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing arguments, of course, viz., some advocate policy with sleight of hand that really means, “Lower taxes for me, but not for thee!” in a close-minded zero-sum mentality; they just want a bigger piece of the pie and they are not at all interested in making that pie bigger. It’s easier to just take someone else’s.

2. Prices (including the price of labor, a/k/a “wages”) might rise because of the psychic effect of “more money”. But they might fall as barriers to entry, previously enshrined in law & tax code, have been removed, and competition prevails.

3. I can’t help but recall Franklin’s famous quote about those who would trade liberty for security. Right now it seems we’ve done just that. And if you look around at the jobless rates or the foreclosures or the number of people on this earth who are starving or living on $2/day or less, well it’s hard to argue that anyone is really very “secure”, either.

Discuss.

These monsters have done things that can never be undone and the total consequences will never be known.

You’re right, Don, but I will go one further: It’s not just depleted uranium or agent orange or Nigerian oil spills that nobody in the developed world ever hears about or the other explicit (albeit hidden) costs of imperialism. The stockpiles of nuclear and other weapons of mass- and indiscriminate destruction; the use of such weapons including depleted uranium, etc., the de facto strip-mining of the Earth’s resources — these are globally existential threats to peace and humanity.

Most people are probably aware of nuclear stockpiles, that cold war remnant with which nobody knows exactly what to do. But there is a reason you’ve probably never heard about the Nigerian oil spills or countless other exploitations of a people and an ecosystem; a reason you’ve probably never heard much about depleted uranium or white phosphorous. They do not want you to know.

And so you don’t.

These aren’t naturally occurring, rather the people at large were manipulated in to sowing the seeds (which will probably one day become the source of our collective destruction), all of these threats had their genesis in the ruling classes’ interests, as a means towards achieving some outcome they desired, consequences be damned.

The issue is this: There are simply no means available to deal with or to mitigate the loss or potential for loss attributable to  many of the problems that the State has created.  Even if we could abolish the state tomorrow, these problems they created which nobody wanted in the first place, remain.

The best thing that could happen to the anarchist movement as a whole, in my opinion, would be for every self-declared anarchist to start working with those around them that feel the same on building their own little vision of what society should look like

To which I reply: I think agorism as a revolutionary strategy has a far better chance of success than sit-ins and demonstrations. It re-invents the “invisible hand”. It’s micro-revolution. Incremental victory. Start by being 1% more free than you were yesterday. You can’t change the world for everyone in it. Admit that. Focus those for whom you can change the world, for whom you can make a difference.

If everyone were to start there, instead of going to some black bloc circle-jerk, I think we’d all be surprised at how rapidly we could effect real change.

For what it’s worth, the winner isshould be Thor’s Mitre Saw:

It’s absurd to define an ideology as pure on paper and refusing to acknowledge the consequences it brings in real life. If “true” socialism is so hard to achieve, or if it most times ends up becoming a paranoid genocidal system of tyranny, that pretty much speaks for itself.

Now the same goes for “capitalism”. It’s equally unconvincing to argue, “Well, we’ve never had really free markets, either.” No, we haven’t ever had “really free markets” and we haven’t ever had “true communism.” Like it, or not, what we’ve got is an institution, or system of institutions the historical roots of which all trace back to violent conquests and usurpations[1]; not, as the communists suggest, to property (even though much property is the result of conquest and usupration).[2]

And yet, all incarnations of “communism” (true, or not) have ushered in evils the likes of which we must admit are equally offensive to any which might happen under a “free market” (true, or not). The results have been as bad, or worse, than those perversions they were intended to cure.

1. Oppression and subjugation? Check.
2. Exploitation? Check.
3. Parasitic Ruling Class? Check.

Discussing the “ruling class“, Sean Gabb differentiates:

The main difference between Marxist and libertarian theories of class is in where each side locates the source of class power. For the Marxists, class power derives from ownership of the means of production…

[T]herefore, the source of class power lies in wealth, and political power follows from wealth. This explains the Marxist belief that a communist revolution, by abolishing class domination, will rid the State of its oppressive nature. The State may then be dispensed from the liberal requirements of limitation and due process, and can be safely used as an instrument for ending such class power as remained. It will then, of itself, wither away.

Neat and tidy, right? Gabb notes that the anti-Marxist “class theory” is less palatable precisely because it is not nearly as black-and-white[3], to the non-Marxist libertarians, the State is a bit more nebulous:

[T]he State is not something created by the already powerful. It is, instead, something captured by those who want to become powerful – and who cannot become powerful by any other means. Without a state, there can be no exploitation.

I’ve always felt that Marx’s theory is overly simplistic. Its simplicity makes it palatable—your opponents easy to identify: they’re the ones who have the stuff. Unfortunately, this theory of class revolution is a dead letter, as numerous real-world examples attest to the impracticability of using the State to eliminate itself (cf. every instance of State Communism in recorded history).

But the very same core problem which renders communist revolutionary theory impotent, plagues much of American libertarianism: we cannot topple the system by working within its accepted rules and boundaries (cf. “minarchism”). We cannot use the State to destroy the State. It doesn’t work that way.

Agorism—individuals creating a counter-economy, by establishing communities and  relationships based on mutual aid, value creation, trust, understanding and compassion—has a chance to succeed where other revolutionary theories have failed. Agorism does not aim to reform the system, or to fix it, or even for the impossible task of toppling it from within; rather it aims to make the system obsolete, to destroy it by circumvention.

1. Oppenheimer, Franz. — The State. “[T]he State, as a class-state, can have originated in no other way than through conquest and subjugation…”
2. Oppenheimer. “This assumed proof is based upon the concept of a ‘primitive accumulation,’ or an original store of wealth, in lands and in movable property, brought about by means of purely economic forces; a doctrine justly derided by Karl Marx as a ‘fairy tale.’”
3. Curiously, the parasite/productive dichotomy is more pronounced in State communist regimes (i.e., nomenklatura) than it is in State capitalist regimes.

In response to the occasional disagreement/dispute/argument/flamewar that arises between anarchists of different stripes on teh interwebz, at Polycentric Order, Michael comments on Why I’m Not a Voluntaryist:

Anarchism is such a radical break with the present order – in fact, so theoretical in nature (the meager handful of historical examples aside), and society itself so complex with almost an infinite number of inputs, contexts, and situations, that envisioning not only what should be, but what is sustainable and what will work, to be next to impossible.

I agree, Michael. It’s stupid to spend our time debating what is essentially unknown.

The problem is that the other people always assert that they do know how things will be, or how they ought to be. And they like to accuse those with whom they disagree of being evil or exploitative or class-traitors, etc.

It’s hard to sit back and take that lying down.