Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: July 31, 2005 - August 06, 2005 Archives: "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."
BINGO! Somebody give that man a cigar.
A free market requires free labor
which required free laborers...
freedom of speech,
freedom to protest,
freedom to ORGANIZE!
without these things,
and others,
all you've got is a rigged game.
Monday, August 01, 2005
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1 comment:
You can easily take this one step further. There is no such thing as the "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 Marshall writes 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. There hasn't been an honest mainstream discussion of economics in this country in thirty years.
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