The people harmed by the externalities of your personal choices because you live in a society where some degree of cooperation with the larger community is required.
The wage effect of the personal choice of what wage to work at it is not an externality. An externality is when one party's actions deprive you of something you are entitled to, like your person or property. The opportunity offered by another individual, is not yours to begin with, and that other indivual has a right to withdraw it by contracting with someone else at a lower wage.
By way of analogy, imagine if you training to become physically more attractive made other male suitors less attractive to women in general. You did not, by virtue of making yourself more attractive, impose a negative externality on other men, as they were never entitled the affection and engagement of women in the first place.
Moreover, the absence of labor regulations and social democratic policies is associated with more rapid economic growth and larger wage gains, so the premise of the notion that there are negative externalities emanating from contract liberty is wrong. The free market is far and away the most efficient way to organize an economy, because the market is the ultimate coordinating tool, and helps raise productivity, which has enormous positive externalities.
These sound like the fundamentalist tenets of an ideology, that just happen to further the interests of the rich, but the statistical/empirical evidence has constistently validated these assertions, as do rationalist deductions based on game theory and widely accepted economic axioms like supply and demand and the efficiency of equilibriums established by them.
> The free market is far and away the most efficient way to organize an economy,
By 'free' do you mean unregulated?
And efficiency (which you seem to equate with 'return on capital') isn't the only positive value, nor is efficiency necessarily a good proxy for all other positive values.
In any case, while a theoretical perfect market without any asymmetries might be most efficient, in practice we have markets that are imperfect in many ways that induce market failures, and regulation is needed to compensate and restore market efficiency. The market for labor is no exception, as the asymmetries in labor relations are huge.
xboxnolifes|4 years ago
klmadfejno|4 years ago
CryptoPunk|4 years ago
By way of analogy, imagine if you training to become physically more attractive made other male suitors less attractive to women in general. You did not, by virtue of making yourself more attractive, impose a negative externality on other men, as they were never entitled the affection and engagement of women in the first place.
Moreover, the absence of labor regulations and social democratic policies is associated with more rapid economic growth and larger wage gains, so the premise of the notion that there are negative externalities emanating from contract liberty is wrong. The free market is far and away the most efficient way to organize an economy, because the market is the ultimate coordinating tool, and helps raise productivity, which has enormous positive externalities.
These sound like the fundamentalist tenets of an ideology, that just happen to further the interests of the rich, but the statistical/empirical evidence has constistently validated these assertions, as do rationalist deductions based on game theory and widely accepted economic axioms like supply and demand and the efficiency of equilibriums established by them.
webmaven|4 years ago
By 'free' do you mean unregulated?
And efficiency (which you seem to equate with 'return on capital') isn't the only positive value, nor is efficiency necessarily a good proxy for all other positive values.
In any case, while a theoretical perfect market without any asymmetries might be most efficient, in practice we have markets that are imperfect in many ways that induce market failures, and regulation is needed to compensate and restore market efficiency. The market for labor is no exception, as the asymmetries in labor relations are huge.