[rchaud]

"Free markets" in the Economics 101 sense don't exist anywhere but in the poorest parts of the world. A minimum wage is anti-market. So is paid time off, parental leave, anti-discrimination protections, and a host other rules and regulations that rich countries enshrined into law decades ago.

[AnthonyMouse]

> A minimum wage is anti-market.

A minimum wage is essentially a subsidy for certain poor people which comes mostly at the expense of different poor people. It's a very silly and inefficient alternative to better policies to help the poor, like a UBI.

> So is paid time off

This is also basically useless (but not as actively harmful as a minimum wage), because not long after it's passed, the value of the benefit gets priced into wages. If people wanted lower wages in exchange for paid time off then there was nothing preventing them from negotiating it to begin with.

> parental leave

Almost the same as paid time off, except that it's a cross-subsidy in favor of new parents, so you couldn't negotiate it in exchange for the same wage reduction in a free market, since you get the benefit (and wouldn't negotiate for it unless you intend to use it), but the wage reduction is spread across everybody and not just you.

Notice that you could get the same cross-subsidy with less distortion by having the government pay your salary during parental leave rather than the employer, because then the cost wouldn't fall disproportionately on employers of parents. That would also require the government to do a more accurate accounting of the cost of the program rather than passing an unfunded mandate.

> anti-discrimination protections

This one's the weird one, because in theory it's a useless requirement since discrimination is irrational and money-losing so nobody should want to do it anyway. But that was a different story when you had white people refusing to patronize employers with black employees or then women, so the original reason this got passed was in the nature of antitrust, which is pro-market. It's debatable whether we still actually need it anymore but it probably doesn't do a lot of harm since (unlike e.g. minimum wage) it isn't prohibiting anything anybody has any good reason to do to begin with.

[dmix]

Of course we don't live in a free market, all western economies have a mixed social-capitalist market [1]. It is the constant tension between the two that must be balanced, because practically markets can't account for every externality.

But there are some extremists on both ends who pretend, both of which are quite rare but the "free market" ones are the most often mischaracterized as wanting zero government instead of a smaller one as they thousands of examples of an ever growing list of government interventions making people worst off or simply pilfering money that should be going to those who produce jobs/wealth into the hands of people whose only skill is having political connections, all wrapped in some social justice/equity nonsense that ultimately leaves the poor worse off and economies stagnating.

[1] In fact the US has the largest administrative state in the world in terms of things like licensing and economic intervention, despite is ridiculous perception as a champion of markets. The only one who may be worse is India. And for all of the talk of 'deregulation' in the US, it only happens rarely and almost exclusively for the top 1% businesses like the top 5 mega-banks, while squeezing out the smaller banks from competing. It is not a general trend in any way that is supported by data, western nation states have exploded in size and scale since WW2. Yet the deregulation myth persists.