From Matt over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians:
Carden claims to be motivated by a concern for the poor. His commitment to free market, his post suggests, is a product of his belief that free markets serve the interests of the poor better than alternative institutions. But his commitment to the free market does not seem at all qualified. He does not say that free markets do, in certain contexts, a pretty good job of promoting the interests of the poor, but perhaps they are limited in such and such ways. He does not present any cases where deviations from the free market might be necessary to promote the interests of the poor. He does not even say that the interests of the poor would be better served by government intervention, but that considerations of aggregate well-being or deontological constraints prevent us from purusing those polciies. The message seems to be that if your concern is to help the poor, free markets are always the best answer.
Now, maybe he’s right. I don’t think he is, but perhaps I’m under the sway of false economic beliefs. Still, it all seems a little too neat. When someone claims to be committed in a fundamental way to both X and Y, and then claims that (happy day!) X and Y always turn out to be mutually recognizable, I begin to suspect that the conclusion is driven more by psychological processes designed to reduce cognitive dissonance than by careful empirical study or theoretical reasoning.
Rather often this kind of thinking goes along with an ongoing redefinition of either X or Y (sometimes both) to make them tautologically compatible. For instance, free markets may not help the poor, y’know, eat or live under a roof in the here and now, but they contribute to a dynamic economy that will reduce the number of poor people and let those who escape poverty achieve much higher incomes than they would under a regulated system. Oh, wait, they don’t? Because poor people don’t have the access to capital for investment in goods and education that would help them get out of poverty, and they don’t have the political or economic power to demand decent treatment from richer people? Well then, free markets may not help the income, morbidity or mortality figures for the poor, but they give poor people the moral sense of self-worth and independence from knowing they’re not supported by handouts. So they still help, see?
Probably the best argument you could make is that free markets allow the poor to buy consumer goods at low prices because they’re sourced cheaply overseas. Of course they also reduce the poor’s wages so they need to buy things more cheaply, but there might be some cases, with some goods, where they cost less as a percentage of the average wage after market liberalisation than they do beforehand, but it’s only arguably worth it. (And said goods are usually, not absolutely necessities, but kinda-necessities, like cars or microwaves).
Henry Ford, that huge bleeding-heart socialist liberal (*cough*), famously noted that he paid his workers enough that they would buy the products they made.
The “vulgar libertarianism” link off that article is very interesting.