My response to her follows. I will highlight my post in blue:
All actions are egotistical. This is not a fuel of libertarianism, only an admission of fact. Action is the use of means to a preferred end. Whether that end is considered colloquially “selfish” or not doesn’t negate the fact that the actor prefers the attainment of that end over the end that would result through inaction and is therefore inherently selfish.
I don’t know why you brought ethics into it as ethical standards are entirely made up and have no objective truth value. You can fight for your values all you want (and you should as a free market responds to consumer values), but saying that you value X therefore it is only right that you impose X on everyone is… well authoritarian.
Government is the very reason corporations exist. They are state sanctions that allow limited liability and foster abuse. This is not libertarianism nor the free market in any stretch of the imagination and it is this state sanction that is a HUGE factor in their power to abuse not only their workers, but endanger their consumers. After all, if they put out a dangerous product that later needs to be recalled, at most their company can be sued and even then their liability is limited (BP had a liability cap of 75 Million). Think about it, if you could profit off of an action that could potentially cause billions of damage, yet you’d only be accountable for 75 million and even then couldn’t personally be accountable, just the legal person you and your buddies created, wouldn’t you be much more likely to take that risk (maybe not you personally, but think about it from a business standpoint) than if you were personally liable for each and every cent of damage. A great deal of abuse in the market would be eliminated by just making companies and their shareholders directly and completely accountable for their actions. Either satisfy your consumer’s wants or go out of business.
Labor Unions and laws claim to have lofty intentions, like raising the minimum wage, but as Frédéric Bastiat would point out, they are looking at the seen and not the unseen. In free markets, wages tend to the discounted marginal revenue product. That is to say, their wages tend to the amount of added revenue that would be received by their employment. It never is actually this amount, but competition raises wages to as close to this amount as possible. If one company’s wage is low, another can and will take their workforce by offering a higher wage. What the minimum wage does do is cause unemployment. This can be shown a priori and empirically. The unemployment also affects the minorities and low skilled workers the most (in a negative way). We’ve also seen the elimination of many trades over the years because of the raising minimum wage. One example is the elevator attendant in the late 1800’s and turn of the century. In 1904, the minimum wage was raised from $0.40 an hour to $0.70 an hour (I may be SLIGHTLY wrong with these figures as I’m operating from memory, but I believe this is right, but my point still stands regardless). What happened was the slow disappearance of this job and a redistribution of investment towards automatic elevators. Same thing with gas station attendants, theater ushers, receptionists to an extent, and more. We can even look at countries without minimum wage. Switzerland: 2.8% unemployment. Singapore: 2.1% United Arab Emirates: 2.4%
When wages of low/unskilled labor are raised above the discounted marginal revenue product, companies decide to invest in skilled labor or capital. This is why unions love the minimum wage as they usually represent skilled laborers. Labor unions have been violent towards strikebreakers for the past 200 years. Why should these people be coerced into obeying union rules when they want to work for the wage given? United Farm Workers were also known to be violent towards immigrants who undermined their efforts.
A priori, it can be shown to cause unemployment simply because in a free market wage is again determined like I described above, reaching an equilibrium centered around the discounted marginal revenue product and if the minimum wage is set above this price, there will be a shortage. Simply supply and demand. If employing a low skilled worker becomes unprofitable above 5 dollars an hour and the minimum wage is 6 dollars an hour, I can simply start investing in capital or skilled labor (say one skilled worker for 16 dollars an hour to replace the three unskilled workers that would now cost 18 dollars an hour). Voila, unemployment of low skilled workers. Hell, I know plenty of people who are unemployed right now who are completely willing to work for 6 dollars an hour, but the government has made this illegal. The proponents of minimum wage complain that the wages paid without minimum wage do not offer enough to live off of. The only problem is that minimum wage jobs SHOULDN’T offer a living wage. They are for those with little to no skill and allow these people to gain training and experience allowing them to move up in the ranks of the labor force. Teen laborers are a prime demographic this applies to.
Unionization itself is still completely possible in a free market (it is free after all) and if workers want to negotiate better terms with their employers, more power to them and as I explain in the next paragraph, the lack of barriers to entry mean that new companies will rise to offer the laborers the conditions they want because then that company will flourish (to the extent that they don’t run at a loss, of course). They of course are only allowed to unionize, boycott, and protest so long as they respect the rights of those who wish to work for the company anyway and do not violate the company’s private property rights by preventing their access to supply trucks and whatnot. Claiming that corporations exploit workers now and therefore the free market sucks is just a huge non-sequitor as it’s government intervention that allows for the limit to competition as it is now.
You mention injustices and abuses and while you didn’t outright say it, a common example of this “corporate abuse” is child labor in the 1800’s. If you don’t think of this as one example of abuse, then ignore this paragraph. When laborers started moving from the farmlands to the cities to work in factories, they did so because the factories offered better opportunities than farming would have. If this were not the case they would have just stayed where they were. Children worked in these farms as well and at the onset of the industrial revolution and throughout it, they worked there too. Was this because capitalists are evil pigs? No. The typical family would often have as many as eight children (and more). Feeding all these kids cost a lot and they needed to work in order to live. We started to see kids leave the workplace not because of laws, but because capitalists invested in technology that allowed workers to be more productive and thus earn more coupled with the development of contraceptives (distributed by.. you guessed it, fuckin capitalists) lowering the average family size. If child labor laws had been implemented before the onset of the industrial revolution, these kids who were working would have simply died. It is through innovation (spurred by free competition) that we increase the productivity of workers and redistribute the former low skilled laborers to other areas of production.
Monopolies are also a huge myth that only exist because of state intervention (hell, the state is by its very nature a monopoly but I digress). When large businesses start to make profits, it is a sign to others to take upon that business,increasing supply and lowering cost. The state currently holds an obscene plethora of barriers to entry in the majority of industrial fields, allowing large corporations to stifle competition. Things like licensing laws, ip laws, etc. The abuses that happen today would never occur on a market without these state interventions that prevent competition. Monopoly horror stories by anti-capitalists also involve buying out of all competition and ruling the market (insert maniacal movie villain laughter here). You have to keep in mind, however, that as a firm begins buying out competition, the remaining companies in the industry become more and more incentivized to raise the price of selling their company and/or not selling out altogether as they will be left with a great portion of the market share and can easily undercut their bigger competitor (and if that competitor wants to undercut back, I’m at a loss as to how this is bad for the consumer as we get a cheaper price). If they undercut the smaller guy to the point of him losing his business, it is again a sign to others to enter the business and offer a competitive price to the consumer.
The biggest problem with the majority of what you wrote is that you’re thinking only in one set of terms. “Companies get to do whatever they want (i.e. pillage and plunder us all).” We also get to do what we want as workers and consumers. All our contracts are voluntary and nobody is forcing anything upon us. Not only that, but if a company is going to get what it wants (business, labor, prosperity, and prolonged profit) they have to give US what WE want. They can’t very well force the money out of our pockets, can they?
If I didn’t properly address your concerns, perhaps you could elaborate a little bit. I kinda went on a long ramble and maybe brought up things that were completely irrelevant to your objections to libertarianism/capitalism. I just tried to address the most common allegations of abuse by companies and explain how they wouldn’t exist on a free market.
I could go on to explain how pillaging of our natural resources wouldn’t exist in a market where private property rights are enforced (hell the entire BP disaster could have been prevented in a free marke), but my fingers are very tired from typing and my girlfriend needs some of my attention tonight as well.