Free Markets Are Not When the Government Forces Workers Into a Contract
A response to Chris Griswold.
Last Monday, policy director for American Compass Chris Griswold penned an opinion piece titled “Republicans: Our Future Is Not With Free Markets. It's With the Working Class” for Newsweek, criticizing Republicans’ response to the railroad strikes.
Worker demands for increased paid sick leave drove the strikes. Fearing an increase in prices and slowing of the economy near Christmas, the Biden Administration forced a contract on the workers using the power granted by the Railway Labor Act of 1926, allowing the Executive to negotiate contracts with railway companies when strikes could disrupt transportation infrastructure.
Griswold starts by criticizing the Biden Administration for forcing the rail workers to accept a contract they did not negotiate or agree to, and he is correct on this. There is no justification for a society that thinks of itself as free to force workers to remain at a job because their choices to seek better employment or demand higher pay may cause harm to the national economy. There is no other way to describe this situation except as modern-day slavery.
Unfortunately, Griswold gets not only everything else wrong, but he also fails to understand that it was not dogmatic libertarianism that made this encroachment of liberty possible but the actions of well-intentioned advocates for the consumer and working class. One example of this is the law that allowed the Executive branch to interfere with contract negotiations between labor and management.
The Railway Labor Act was not the product of market fundamentalists seeking to maximize profit at the expense of the worker; it was the product of collective bargaining agreements between labor, management, and government, with the express intention of protecting the worker’s ability to bargain while maintaining the function of the railroad collectively. Instead of giving workers the power to better their situation, the bill has subjected them to the whims of a politician more concerned with reelection than he is promoting the interest of the American worker.
The undeniable lesson of the last 200 years is that truly free markets have promoted the interest of the ordinary man more effectively than any central planner ever has. The centralization of industry, slowing of the improvement of the worker, and dissatisfaction with our current arrangement is the direct result of the very polices Griswold advocates for.
As the relationship between the goverment and industry has grown closer, so has the ability of the corporation to protect their interests against potential competitors, limiting the freedom of choice of both the worker and consumer. The solution is not, as Griswold and his allies would tell you, to assume that this time it will be different. That the failure of the last reformers can be explained by their reluctance to do what was necessary or a failure of degree of policy instead of kind.
It is no coincidence that as the goverment has taken a larger role in our economic lives, the institution of the family has decayed. In times past, it was the family that would support you through economic hardship. Not only where they a source of happiness and meaning, but also security. Politicians in Washington decided that the family could not be trusted to be the safety net for society. Faceless, souless machinery has taken the role of providing for us in times of unemployment, economic hardship, and retirement. Is it any wonder that the importance of the family has receded as its role has been assumed by goverment?
To call this situation the product of Libertarian economic dogma is at best ignorant and at worst dishonest. No, it is the product of intrusive goverment, well meaning advocates of the working man, and progressive minded intellectuals set on directing the infinite complexity of markets to serve their own ends.
Instead of confusing the poison for the antitode, it is time to trust the ordinary man to know and protect his own interest; to not replace the corporate master with a goverment one.
This is not an endorsement of inaction. Those that care about defending and promoting the system directly responsible for lifting millions out of abject poverty have much to do. The ties between big goverment and big business must be severed if we want to restore faith in free markets and by extension a free society.
What it is an endorsement of is not repeating the same mistakes of those before. It is an endorsement of having the humility to not think this time the central planners will get it right or that the last ones were driven by anything but a desire to do good. Any such assumption would be a fatal conceit.
It's amazing how many otherwise intelligent people cannot grasp the difference between a free market and crony corporatism.