But how do you get the voluntary exchange of goods and services when one party to the exchange is forced to provide services at the point of a gun?
If two muggers are walking down a dark alleyway, and they see you, and one mugger gives the other mugger $20 for the exclusive right to rob you, is that the operation of the free market?
It absolutely is a loaded use of the term when we’re talking about slavery, whether the slavery is legal or illegal.
sigh
If you employ the legal and moral fiction that the slave in question is property, then you really don’t need that property’s permission to be used, now do you? And if a slave is property, it can be exchanged as a good in the marketplace.
sigh
But the slave trade was controlled and encouraged by the governments of the time, with those interests being encouraged and protected by said governments. The participants weren’t operating in a ‘free market’, but operating at the direction and under the protection of the governments involved…hell, in most cases, the people running the governments had a vested interest in the slave trade, since it was putting money directly into their pockets or were literally owned by those in charge!
Even after the US revolution, folks like George Washington were SLAVE OWNERS…they had a vested interest in using the government to protect their own interests. That’s pretty much the exact opposite of any definition of ‘free market’ I’VE ever heard.
-XT
So if you’re in prison, and your cellmate sells the right to rape you for a carton of cigarettes, that’s the free market. You are property, so he doesn’t need your permission to sell you, right?
Wrong. Systems can and do do things. Just because a system happens to be built out of people instead of cells or bees or transistors doesn’t change that.
And the free market isn’t an abstraction, it’s a system.
Cite?
Cite for what? That people controlling the governments involved in the slave trade had vested interests? That those governments protected and encouraged the slave trade?? If that’s what you want a cite for, all I can say is…seriously?
-XT
Yes, unless we employ the caveat that illegal actions are a subversion of the free market (which it would be a subversion today, since you cannot legally bargain for the rape of another human being).
The way they taught it to me in economics class, any sale you make where both parties are uncoerced in the process of negotiating the sale is a free market transaction. External forces applied that limit or control the process of negotiating the sale reduce the ‘freedom’ of the market in question, ranging from the government limiting the time and place of the sale through to complete government control of the process, possibly to the exclusion of money being exchanged at all. But absent such external controls, the market is free.
So, slave trade would be an exercise of the free market between the buyer and seller, because both parties engaged in the trade were uncoerced. The fact that the induction into slavery might not have been part of a willing transaction is irrelevent; nobody asks steel ore its permission either. Only the actual transaction in question -the sale itself- is considered when assessing the freedom of the market.
If you’re using a different definition of free market than this, I’d be curious what it is and where you heard it.
If the OP wished to restrict the offences being questioned to legal ones, that’s one thing, but the free market itself does little to prevent atrocities. More precisely, you can be as atrocious as you like until the point where it scares off the customers. Only then do market forces discourage it.
That’s not what you said. You said the slave trade was “controlled” and operated “at the direction” of the government. That’s a whole lot different than simply recognizing the legality of such trade.
If you are going that route, the free market has never been guilty of anything because it cannot exist. You aren’t ever going to see some sort of Platonic ideal of the free market in the real world.
What passes for a free market in the real world however can and has always enthusiastically profited off of slavery, now and in the past, legal or not.
I knew someone was going to get bent out of shape by use of the term, which is puzzling to me, considering that its definition is completely neutral. “Exchange of goods and services” is pretty broad and generic language too. If a slave is property, then it can be exchanged as a good just like any other good.
So, what you are saying is that anything that involves ‘trade’ equals ‘free market’, even when it’s pretty clear that the various governments and the folks running them were directly involved in the slave trade, passing laws to encourage it and receiving large amounts of revenue (personal and into the coffers of the various national treasuries) due to it? So, ‘free market’ doesn’t mean ‘free of government regulation, control or manipulation’, just ‘anything that involved people making money’…correct? Because that’s not the definition I’m familiar with. The one I’m familiar with pretty much states that there WERE no ‘free markets’ (even loosely) until fairly recently.
That’s why I asked you what you meant, because that’s ONE of the things I said, along with the others. So, you want a cite that countries like the US/UK/France/etc controlled the slave trade. Will me getting cites showing how the laws were manipulated in order to encourage the slave trade do? I mean, this is basically history 101 stuff, but I want to be sure of what you are really wanting here. As for ‘operated at the direction of the government’, will cites showing government officials and even presidents who were directly involved in slavery or the slave trade suffice?
-XT
Hollywood
Because ‘free market’ isn’t JUST the ‘exchange of goods and services’…it’s an exchange of goods and services without government manipulation or direct involvement or stake in the success of the venture. I’ll even concede that regulation has a role in ‘free markets’, but the slave trade goes beyond mere regulation…laws were enacted directly by the governments involved to encourage and expand the slave trade, which is pretty much direct manipulation of the system…something that is pretty much completely opposite of any definition of a ‘free market’ I’ve ever heard of.
Instead of doing this dance, why not simply change what the OP is asking to what Lemur866 suggested? That’s what the OP really seemed to be after…unless it was simply to take a swipe at all the notion or concept of a ‘free market’.
-XT
That IS the free market, when the market is strong enough to dominate government.
Not unless you want to talk about something that cannot exist outside of maybe two people bartering in a cellar in a failed state somewhere.
Well, “free of government regulation” doesn’t work either, because without government regulation a free market won’t exist long. If Og is free to bash you on the head with a rock and take your goods, that’s not a free market. So some system of laws has to exist so that Og won’t crush your skull.
Markets can arise independently, but they cannot exist under anarchic conditions. That doesn’t mean the regulations have to be imposed by government neccesarily, but there has to be some sort of social control that takes the place of the rule of law, otherwise we’re back to the skull-bashing.
Or are we including skull-bashing under the free market rubric?
Near as I can tell, you seem to believe that the government not declaring the purchase or sale of slaves to be illegal as an example of “direct manipulation of the system.” Which makes no sense in the case of the US, because slave trading was already happening before we were a nation, and the most the Constitution did was to declare that slaveholders had a right to have their slaves returned if they escaped. If you’re trying to argue that that’s an example of government meddling in the marketplace, then I’m unconvinced.
Heck, if you’re going to argue that government intervention can be ignored when analyzing the moral behavior of what you call the “free market,” then government has an easy way to make “free markets” look bad. Simply pass along all the nasty parts of government to private contractors, while keeping feel-good things under the public umbrella. So have the “market” fight wars, hunt down dissidents, and run jails, while the government hands out foreign aid and domestic welfare programs (using tax money collected by private contractors.)
This is a stupid and loaded way to argue the morality of the two systems.
The free market doesn’t have morality! Who told you it did?