HOW FREE IS OUR MARKET ECONOMY…AND WHAT’S OUR LABOR WORTH?
(…it depends on how we define –free- and who gets to decide what our labor is worth)

The current anxiety over when the Fed will decide about raising interest rates (and by how much) has everyone on tenterhooks. So we have some questions about that here: 1) How come seven private individuals called the Board of Governors of the Fed get to decide such a thing…for the rest of us? 2) How are we a “free” market economy…as opposed to those other “managed” kinds, when our interest rates are dictated and manipulated by seven people, how and in what way we’re allowed to set up business, how and in what way we’re allowed to produce whatever we care to produce, and how and in what way we’re allowed to price, market, and sell whatever we produce, how and in what way we’re allowed to keep whatever returns from what we produce, and, what the value of the labor to produce what is being produced, is determined by some sort of bureaucratically conceived formula? 3) Lastly, how come almost every conceivable aspect of business or enterprise, from the smallest pushcart type venture to the largest industrial and commercial conglomerates, is regulated to within an inch of its existence?

How can any of that in any way allow us to proclaim we’re…free?

We’re coming to believe that there is no such thing as a truly “free market” economy. There are only some that are less…constricted…(one might even say less…constipated) than others, and that all those expert economic pundits, government and political leaders just use the phrase as a euphemism to rate how un-constricted or un-constipated any given economic system may be…compared to any others.

As to the value or worth of anyone’s labor, we’re now seeing a trend not to have it determined by ourselves bargaining with those to whom we provide it, but by some arbitrary politically correct populist mantra about “a living, or minimum” wage. The most glaring deficiency of such an arbitrary approach is that it does not consider the factor of – function- as a determinate for the value of labor. That is, is the function of digging a ditch, comparable in value to the function of preparing and producing an invoice to present to a customer? Or that of performing a janitorial function to that of providing a security function?

Simply put, if we’re going to arbitrarily establish a minimum wage level, at the bottom of a functional totem pole, then there will necessarily have to be a corresponding increase for every other function ranging up along that pole. The problem with all of that, of course, is that in our pursuit of “fairness” and “equality” we seem bent on abdicating our individual rights to determine our own economic worth and social mobility, into the hands of government to do it for us.

If we’re in a job that we neither like, nor care for what it yields or returns for our efforts, we always have the option of…voting with our feet to find something more to our liking, and offering a better return for our efforts. That’s called self-determination and self-sufficiency. The other way is called…dependency.

In short what this really boils down to is this: We have a choice in life of either being hungry …but free…wolves…or someone else’s well fed and coddled, but chained up…pet dogs. As a society we seem to have drifted away from such a choice. We no longer want to have to sing for our suppers…as wolves must do…because we’ve been conditioned to believe we need a super-nanny governance to provide for all our needs instead calling it…security.

C’est la vie!

CENTURION