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Freedom and free markets
Aug. 15th, 2008 02:52 pmThis article is interesting because it had me going "yes, uh huh, wait, WTF no."
If it's tl;dr, I'll summarize: Basically, Carson argues that workers would have more power to negotiate under a hypothetical free market. I say hypothetical, because as we know, all historical attempts to increase the freedom of the market have been accompanied by attacks on the rights of workers. So we don't have an example of pure libertarianism to point to, but we do have examples of societies that are more libertarian than others, with few market restrictions. These include Pinochet's Chile, the Gilded Age, and present-day Iraq. Hardly workers' paradises, any of them.
I do agree with him at the beginning where he describes Taft-Hartley as defanging union struggles. But I think that a freer market, in order to survive, would pretty much have to outlaw unions altogether. I can't see it working any other way, because most people are going to choose job security, health care, and a social safety net over the "freedom" to work as hard as possible and make as much money as they can. Sure, there's a small proportion of the population that sees the latter option as a desirable goal in and of itself, and those are the people who rise to the top in a profit-oriented economy. Libertarianism assumes, however, that all people are like this.
Anyway, I was considering writing a long refutation of this, and then today, I ran across the following quote at Slacktivist:
Replace "anarchism" with "libertarianism" or "someone who rattles on about the free market" and you have a better refutation than I could have come up with. Another impressive thing about The Shock Doctrine was how persuasively it argued for the ruling class' persistent interest in chaos.
It's embarrassing, incidentally, that Carson brings up the IWW, even though we have nothing to do with this sort of thinking. I'm not entirely sure how you get from "free market" to "classless society and abolition of the wage system," except via some frightening mental contortions.
The article also shows a staggering incomprehension of how the globalized economy works, but that's a subject for another post. Hint: Most of the working class is not actually committing corporate sabotage on their computers in office cubicles. You can only think that way if you don't understand that production has largely been outsourced to the Global South, where libertarian internet geeks can't see it.
If it's tl;dr, I'll summarize: Basically, Carson argues that workers would have more power to negotiate under a hypothetical free market. I say hypothetical, because as we know, all historical attempts to increase the freedom of the market have been accompanied by attacks on the rights of workers. So we don't have an example of pure libertarianism to point to, but we do have examples of societies that are more libertarian than others, with few market restrictions. These include Pinochet's Chile, the Gilded Age, and present-day Iraq. Hardly workers' paradises, any of them.
I do agree with him at the beginning where he describes Taft-Hartley as defanging union struggles. But I think that a freer market, in order to survive, would pretty much have to outlaw unions altogether. I can't see it working any other way, because most people are going to choose job security, health care, and a social safety net over the "freedom" to work as hard as possible and make as much money as they can. Sure, there's a small proportion of the population that sees the latter option as a desirable goal in and of itself, and those are the people who rise to the top in a profit-oriented economy. Libertarianism assumes, however, that all people are like this.
Anyway, I was considering writing a long refutation of this, and then today, I ran across the following quote at Slacktivist:
"You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists."
— G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
Replace "anarchism" with "libertarianism" or "someone who rattles on about the free market" and you have a better refutation than I could have come up with. Another impressive thing about The Shock Doctrine was how persuasively it argued for the ruling class' persistent interest in chaos.
It's embarrassing, incidentally, that Carson brings up the IWW, even though we have nothing to do with this sort of thinking. I'm not entirely sure how you get from "free market" to "classless society and abolition of the wage system," except via some frightening mental contortions.
The article also shows a staggering incomprehension of how the globalized economy works, but that's a subject for another post. Hint: Most of the working class is not actually committing corporate sabotage on their computers in office cubicles. You can only think that way if you don't understand that production has largely been outsourced to the Global South, where libertarian internet geeks can't see it.
