The Workplace

Our greatest daily loss of liberty is in the workplace. Libertarian pretense that the workplace is voluntary would only make sense if people had an equal alternative to the workplace. Power differences between employer and employee result in many losses of liberty.

Links

Contract Feudalism [More...]

Contract Feudalism describes the increasing power of employers over employee's lives outside the workplace.

NEW 5/20/2013: Keynes on Laissez-Faire [More...]

Gavin Kennedy writes: "‘Laissez-nous faire’ is not advocated as a universal principle for merchants and their customers; it was a very partial principle for merchants only... [Mill and mine owners] wrapped themselves in laissez-faire flags to wipe up the blood of their employees when they demanded their own freedoms and not those of their labourers or their customers."

Let It Bleed: Libertarianism and the Workplace [More...]

"What makes the private sector, especially the workplace, such an attractive instrument of repression is precisely that it can administer punishments without being subject to the constraints of the Bill of Rights. It is an archipelago of private governments, in which employers are free to do precisely what the state is forbidden to do: punish without process. "

Libertarian Mugged by Reality [More...]

Alex Beinstein, a U. of Chicago student, gets a job and loses his libertarianism.

The United what of America?

Julian Assange points out that some corporations rival nation-states in size. Then he compares their systems of governments, pointing out that corporations have civic freedoms comparable to those of the 1960's Soviets.

Quotations

This notion, that the preservation of freedom sometimes requires the restriction of freedom, may induce incomprehension or apoplexy in the libertarian—but it should not. After all, [minarchist] libertarians are themselves committed to such a thought in their basic justification for the state: the coercion of the state frees people from the “wild” coercion of lawless individuals.
Chris Bertram, "Let It Bleed: Libertarianism and the Workplace"