Libertarians like to say the market is foundation of freedom and they’re right in the sense that it’s the core myth that makes all the other claims to freedom seem plausible. But since it is merely a myth, it’s a shoddy foundation.
The familiar argument is that, unless you inherit wealth, you have to give some significant percentage of your time to ‘making a living’ or otherwise you’ll starve. The vast majority of people are thus ‘wage slaves‘ with little time to enjoy freedom of any kind.
A less remarked upon constraint is that everyone else also has to make a living. If the exercise of your freedom involves organizing other poeple, you have to deal with the fact that they all have needs. This requires access to considerable resources.
There’s also the need for equipment, real estate, and so on. If you actually want to exercise your rights to assembly, speech, religion, etc, at any scale beyond the embarrassingly impotent, you need both people and equipment. The expenses mount.
More importantly, this ‘exercise of freedom’ takes place in a marketplace dominated by long-established, well-connected, wealthy organizations. They not only enjoy an ‘incumbent advantage’ but actually define the market and ’demand’. They shape people’s preferences.
These existing organizations also act as gatekeepers, deciding what gets promoted and what doesn’t, what oversteps boundaries and what doesn’t. They are everywhere and they are unavoidable.
The way we talk about this is all itself a myth. Competition, incumbent advantage, monopoly power, network effects, etc. They all imagine that there was once a ‘pristine’ marketplace where some institutions gained advantage over others. This is all nonsense.
There is in fact no ‘entrepreneur‘ (for-profit or otherwise) of the kind we mythologize. Nobody has ever bravely faced the incumbents, armed only with self-belief and fresh ideas. This is not possible because we are all formed by the very institutions we’re supposedly opposing.
Thus, what we actually have in all cases is a set of institutions that create other institutions in much the same way they always have, but like to promulgate a certain mythology about their origins. This mythology has at its base a pernicious lie: ‘anyone can do this’.
In actuality, all of your ‘freedoms’ amount to nothing but harmful propaganda. At the core of this propaganda is the myth of the market, which falsely leads you to believe these ‘freedoms’ offer a path from impotence to power, if only you can combine right mix of skill and luck.
The big mistake here is to think that by replacing the market economy with something else we could give people ‘real freedom’. The ‘problem‘ isn’t the market economy (which is a myth anyway) but that we are dependent animals and this isn’t something that has a solution.
It will always be possible for others to starve and kill you, to silence you, to coerce and threaten you. That’s what it means to be human and why we will never be without duty. We must serve a higher, communal good in order to thrive. Fantasies about autarkic freedom are tricks.
