[pretoriusB]

Well, "pro free market" is usually (and silently) taken to mean "whatever benefit me as an employeer and screw the workers".

As in: "if I want to have people working 20 hours per day, with no overtime for less than minimum wage, I should be FREE to do so, and people are FREE not to work for me".

That's the kind of "FREE" the free market stands for usually.

Of course, when all employers follow the same idea, or when people are desperate to find any work to survive (e.g because of a lack of jobs in their city), the latter point about "choice" becomes moot.

[kylebrown]

This train of thought leads to the philosophy of freedom: positive freedom (free to) and negative freedom (free from). I think the best way to think about freedom is not as a binary relationship (X is free from/to Y), but as a ternary relationship (X is free from Y to Z).

[lostlogin]

A fellow cynic! I see FREE MARKET and straight away re-read the paragraph to see who is getting screwed. I'm rarely disappointed.

[ansgri]

As kylebrown noted the distinction between 'free from' and 'free to', your interpretation suggests that the free market is the freedom to screw everyone you could manage to. I like this description, but the question is: is it net negative for people / production / indvidual?

-- a fellow cynic.