Believe it or not, I agree with what you say regarding colonialism, corruption and imperialism. What we differ is as to who are those morally culpable.

Let us take your example of the use of military might to extract wealth. You listed a few private entities, but surely you must realise that they do not themselves provide the military might: it is the government which does.

Your argument is that the state should step in to right wrongs, but my argument is that the state itself is the very cause of those wrongs. That parasitic private entities benefit from the state’s rapacity is merely a natural outcome. Where there are predators, there will always be carrions.

I don’t believe I have ever argued on this blog that unions or collective bargaining is a problem per se. What I do have a problem with however, is picketing. Unions should be free to organise and recruit, BUT firstly they should never be allowed to make membership mandatory, and secondly they should not be allowed to prevent other non-union workers to take over their jobs.

PS: do you mind posting your comments over at Singapore Angle? we are sorely in need of intelligent commentors there.

This is a common claim by neoliberals/neoconservatives (who never look very different on this issue, for some reasons which are obvious — typically, they are both well-off). Unfortunately, the terms of those ‘voluntary’ transactions are increasingly set entirely by people who have vastly more power than others, for reasons that have everything to do with (i) colonialism (ii) corruption and (iii) imperialism. It is wrong to think that what is commonly seen as the ‘free market’ (absence of governmental intervention in the economic activities of the domestic rich world NOW) has anything to do with the entirely laudable capitalist values of each producing value and receiving value in return. It has everything to do with centuries and centuries of the use of forcible suppression to exploit workers, to steal land from those who never had a say (because their own leaders suppressed them), and, even now, to use pure military might to extract wealth from the unwilling (Iraq and Halliburton, the Lincoln Group, and other members of the military-industrial complex, anyone?)

Even Nozick, you realise, believed that the use of force by the state may be justified in addressing the past use of force or fraud. The fact is that so much of what happens in ‘the market’ now is dictated precisely by people who have used nothing less than pure violence to get and maintain the position they have.

As Thomas Frank asks, market fundamentalists are fond of saying that the market is the people, so the market is democratic, but why aren’t collective bargaining and voting kinds of democracy as well? If we’ll grant that a bunch of people binding together for the profit motive is OK where companies are concerned, we don’t complain that a company achieving deals on its terms hurts those outside it, so why is the same complaint made of unions? What’s the real distinction?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,775031,00.html