A REAL FREE MARKET WOULDN'T NEED SOLDIERS

From Talking Points Memo courtesy of This is not a compliment:

There is one thing, however, that this line of reasoning misses: political violence. Which is, after all, the grand-daddy of extra-economic inputs.

You can't make a solid argument that wages in other countries have found their natural level if one of the major 'inputs' is organized political violence to keep wages low and labor activism inert.

To put it more concretely, one part of a real market in labor is the ability for people to protest conditions, either actively (through organizing) or passively (through quitting or refusing to work). But if people who try to form labor unions are murdered then that whole theory falls apart.

Click here for the rest.

This is also at play, to a lesser extent, here in the United States: the Wagner Act, passed in the 1930s, makes it illegal to fire workers who are trying to unionize; nonetheless, the federal government has refused to enforce the law since the Reagan administration. Indeed, the deck is completely stacked against labor here, and most workers not already in unions understand that--soldiers aren't needed to keep Americans from demanding their rights. Third world laborers, however, have to be taught what's what at the end of a gun barrel. Obviously, there's nothing free about these "free markets" either at home or abroad.

You can easily take this one step further. There is no such thing as a "free market." It is an artificial construct which only exists because of massive state intervention going way beyond what Milton Freidman and his neo-liberal apostles say it should. The violent coercion of labor about which Josh Marshall writes in the above excerpt is but one example. Another is how the billions of tax dollars annually pumped into the the military-industrial complex essentially serve as a crutch, an old fashioned Keynesian stimulus, to bolster American capitalism as a whole, which cannot survive on its own. Capitalism is just one big lie after another: it simply doesn't work the way they insist it does, and it is most definitely not a natural manifestation of freedom and democracy--in reality it's quite the reverse.

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