Bleeding Obvious

Tyler Cowen unkindly (I’m sure he meant well!) directs my attention to something called Crooked Timber, which appears to be some sort of nuisance blog that enjoys making nonsensical claims about libertarianism:

…we have to understand how little freedom workers enjoy at work. Unfreedom in the workplace can be broken down into three categories.

1. Abridgments of freedom inside the workplace

They have few rights on the job—certainly none of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendment liberties that constitute the bare minimum of a free society; thus, no free speech or assembly, no due process, no right to a fair hearing before a panel of their peers…

Goodness, that sounds awful! Why on Earth would anyone voluntarily join one of these horrible gulags?

Oh wait, I remember: because they’re being paid.

Like most complaints about libertarian ideas, this one is just a simple failure of logic. Any increase in workers’ “freedom” is a corresponding decrease in the “freedom” of their employers in how they choose to employ.

The employer-employee relationship is this: your employer (for whatever reason) has some money. You want his money. Could you live without his money? Yes (in this country, a thousand times yes). But you want it, because with your employer’s money you can buy stuff that makes life more fun. And so you form some contract under which you do some stuff for the employer (possibly including peeing when he wants you to and not being a Communist), and in exchange he gives you some money. In no way is any of this forced on you.

(Is money power? Of course it is. Should power be equally distributed? Of course it shouldn’t. The private economy exists largely to determine what things people want done and reward people (like, say, Jeff Bezos) for doing them by giving them more money (power). You didn’t create Amazon.com, so Jeff Bezos has more money than you.)

Contrast this with your relationship with the gov’t, which can not only make you pee on command, but may lock you up if it doesn’t like what it finds in your pee—none of which you agreed to, and for which it does not give you any money. In fact, you have to pay them taxes, again whether you like it or not, or you will be seized and imprisoned and fined. That’s coercion—you didn’t agree to any of it, it’s all imposed on you. Private entities, otoh, cannot tax, imprison, or take life (the primary purpose of gov’t is to prevent anyone but gov’t from doing so) which is why employees don’t need a Bill of Rights that says they can tell their bosses they suck or bring guns to work

Next the authors offer this little gem that is supposed to prove how awful the relationship truly is: what if (gasp) your employer asks for sex as a condition of continued employment? [cue villain music] Surely this proves… something or other? Well it’s obviously a Very Bad Thing an employer could do to women, and that means… something. (Won’t someone please think of the women???)

The sexual harassment question really isn’t even interesting. Can a registered prostitute be fired for refusing to have sex? Of course. If you’re not a registered prostitute, then your employer is asking you to do something you didn’t contract for, like a secretary being asked to place high-explosive demolition charges, which violates all sorts of laws as well as leaving the employer open to all sorts of civil liability — besides being a pretty stupid way to run a business. There’s a place for common-sense regulation in most libertarian worldviews even for acts the market is going to punish anyway. (And this question has two sides—what if an employee says to a supervisor “Hey, I’ll give you the best blowjob of your life for a raise!” Terrible moral dilemma? Agency conflicts just aren’t that interesting.)

Chris’ rather feeble response to all this was that Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen showed freedom is more limited when wealth is inequally distributed, which is really a very beautiful concept that unfortunately doesn’t work for long in a world where people respond to incentives (Year 1: “We’ve redistributed all wealth equally. Hooray! Freedom is maximized!” Year 2: “Uh oh, where’s all the food?”) as recent history has amply demonstrated from Argentina to Zimbabwe — without incentive-driven meritocratic inequality everyone ends up equally poor, and freedom is minimized.

On the plus side, commenter Data Tutashkhia seems to capture the real issue perfectly:

It’s not about any ‘freedom’; as others said, it’s all about power. Employer, by definition, already has more power than an employee, so he has to be taken down a peg. Or two. As much as possible, in fact.

Oddly enough, Chris’ deep devotion to the sacred principle of freedom of speech didn’t extend to people on his website who point out how ridiculous his arguments are, so at that point your humble author was asked to leave (quell d’ommage!), in a lovely twist that marvelously mirrors the reason every Marxist state has collapsed: ideals or not, people still behave like people.