Yeah, yeah, a new series… Freedom Fridays. The first post is a response to a Daily Kos article that a friend of mine wanted me to talk about.

How freedom was lost

IN the article, “How Freedom Was Lost,” Devilstower wrote of the deaths caused by pollution from a zinc factory in Donora, Pennsylvania, the floods from a coal mine in Saunders, WV, and the tragedy of the triangle shirtwaist factory in New York (NYU, by the way, owns the building now).

No one implemented health, safety, and environmental legislation because they thought it would be fun….. We did it because that kind of freedom, marketplace freedom, was literally killing us.

Read the article before going on — the rest of this post will make much more sense. Today’s topic: regulation and the free market. Onwards!

What a free market is (and is not)

CONSERVATIVES and free-marketeers talk about a “free market” all the time, but it’s sometimes unclear what this term means.

John Locke is famous for coining the three essential freedoms of humanity: life, liberty, and property. The violations of these three freedoms take some form of the following crimes: murder, slavery, and theft. According to many believers in the free market, the protection of these liberties is not only the purpose of society but creates the best outcomes.

That’s what a free market is — a society in which individuals are free to mutually trade with each other, given that they do not infringe on other peoples’ rights.

But, Devilstower argues, a purely free market lacks regulation, and without regulation, people infringe on each others’ rights — just look at the pollution in Donora!

Why a free market lives on regulation

The answer to this is that the situations Devilstower describes are not genuine free markets. Clearly pollution destroys property and injures — sometimes kills — people. That’s an infringement on those peoples’ rights, and therefore not part of a free market. A world where corporations can simply earn money without bearing the costs is corporatism, not freedom.

Devilstower tries to equate free markets with a complete lack of regulation — but from a geniune free market point of view, that’s preposterous. Of course free markets need regulation — it’s impossible to have a free market without regulation. Freedom needs government to protect it.

For example, police and courts are the most important form of regulation. The police regulates our behavoir in a free society so that we don’t infringe on the rights of other people — we don’t murder, steal, or enslave.

So no, Devilstower — the free market wasn’t killing us. An unfree market was. Don’t equate free markets and individual liberties with anarchy! Freedom is not only about protection from the state, but from other people.

I have a proposal, sir

So, as part of the conservative/libertarian/classical liberal backlash against Obama, I’ve called him “socialist.” I regret that. His policies certainly tend towards that direction, but to call him “a socialist” may — at least, for now — be too much. The word “socialist,” I think, is quite extreme, and isn’t so much used to accurately describe Obama, but to elicit an emotional reaction from listeners. Wrongheaded his policies are, but socialist they are not.

So, I have a proposal. I promise to stop calling Obama a socialist… if progressives and liberals stop calling our current system a free market. Because we don’t have a free market, and you can’t blame the free market for something if it doesn’t exist.