[leto_ii]

> That's how free markets work.

Why should work relations be based on the "free market"? Why should we consider the market the core institution of a society, the concept underlying any form of relationship?

"Free" markets the way libertarians tend to imagine them do not exist, and for very good reason - they would lead to a hasty collapse of society. You can't for example sell yourself into slavery, you can't be hired to work more than a certain number of hours per week, or if you're younger than a certain age etc. There are countless restrictions on what a contractual relationship can look like between a worker and a corporation - things are definitely not "free".

[WalterBright]

> the way libertarians tend to imagine them

I don't know where your information is coming from, but it isn't libertarianism. Under libertarianism, your rights are inalienable, and supersede contractual rights. Hence, you cannot sell yourself into slavery, because your right to liberty supersedes any contract. You can agree to work more than X hours per week, but you cannot be forced to stick to that agreement. Libertarianism only applies to legally consenting adults. Others (like children) have additional legal rights, such as not being bound by contracts.

There are many different meanings of "free". Common misunderstandings of libertarianism come from conflating different meanings of "free". The free in free markets generally means free from force or fraud.

As for "hasty collapse", the US was a reasonable approximation to a free market in its first century, excluding the slave south, and went from subsistence farming to superpower. This also saw the greatest mass rise from poverty to wealth the world has ever seen.

As for other countries, the more they embraced free markets, the more they prospered.

[leto_ii]

> Under libertarianism, your rights are inalienable, and supersede contractual rights. Hence, you cannot sell yourself into slavery

This seems to be debated both in popular libertarian forums [1] and among academics [2]. I haven't read source [2] in detail, but at a quick glance I can offer the following quote (p. 41):

"At the extreme right would be the libertarian philosophy I shall defend which maintains that everything should be legally alienable or commodifiable."

Robert Nozick himself seems to support the idea of voluntary slavery [3]:

"Most controversially, and unlike Locke and Kant, Nozick argued that consistent application of self-ownership and non-aggression principle[10] would allow and regard as valid consensual or non-coercive enslavement contracts between adults. He rejected the notion of inalienable rights advanced by Locke and most contemporary capitalist-oriented libertarian academics, writing in Anarchy, State, and Utopia that the typical notion of a "free system" would allow adults to voluntarily enter into non-coercive slave contracts."

> Libertarianism only applies to legally consenting adults. Others (like children) have additional legal rights, such as not being bound by contracts.

Again, it seems that leading libertarian theorists would disagree. Take Murray Rothbard for one [4]:

"In Rothbard's view of parenthood, "the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights". Thus, Rothbard stated that parents should have the legal right to let any infant die by starvation and should be free to engage in other forms of child neglect. However, according to Rothbard, "the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children". In a fully libertarian society, he wrote, "the existence of a free baby market will bring such 'neglect' down to a minimum"."

> the US was a reasonable approximation to a free market in its first century [...] This also saw the greatest mass rise from poverty to wealth the world has ever seen.

I'm sure the American indians, the original inhabitants of the continent, would not exactly agree that the outcomes of that century were so great. Also, to my knowledge, the award for greatest rise from poverty would go to the China of recent decades (not a particularly nice place).

> excluding the slave south

You really shouldn't.

> and went from subsistence farming to superpower

Not in its first century. That happened a bit later, once the US was a far more centralized entity with a far stronger federal government (again, I don't think becoming a superpower is a good thing or a good argument for free markets).

> As for other countries, the more they embraced free markets, the more they prospered.

Do you have any arguments or examples for this?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLibertarians/comments/7u7r2m/am_...

[2] https://cdn.mises.org/17_2_3.pdf

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nozick#Political_philos...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard#Children's_rig...