Phony Choices
I am tired of libertarians and their framings on "freedom" and "choice". Here are some typical arguments I hear:
- "Nobody forces you to be tracked on the Internet. If you don't like being tracked then just don't use these services."
- "Nobody is forcing these poor people in Country X to work in sweatshops. They do so because this is the best alternative for them."
- "This work situation is not exploitative. All parties entered into it voluntarily."
One problem is that a choice without a viable alternative is not a choice. If my options are either to work or to starve in the streets, then I will probably choose to work. That does not mean working is a viable alternative:
- I might only be fractionally better off working than starving on the streets. In some cases work might put me further into debt, such as the case with company stores and company scrip.
- Working might help me in the short term, but might have disastrous long-term consequences like ruining my health.
There is little incentive to fix the system so that choosing to work is significantly better than starving on the streets; in fact the incentive is opposite to this.
There is an idiotic argument that even if some choices are bad, the powerful people who offer those choices will compete with each other, offering better terms for the workers and improving their situations. In some cases this is true, but in many cases it is not:
- When those powerful people are colluding with each other.
- When the powerful people have the ability to make life WORSE for contractees who do not take the choice. ("Of course you are not obligated to work overtime, but it will demonstrate that you are not a good team player.")
- When there is a lack of information on the contractees part. (For example, people apply to work as domestics overseas, and are told that the work will be easy and the pay will be good. Then they come over, have their passports taken from them, and get into large amounts of debts to "pay their passage" overseas -- and find that the recruiters were lying outright about work conditions.)
Choice is on a continuum. If there are lots of viable options then choices are real ("which soda pop do I want to drink?") If there are few viable options or all options are terrible then the choice is phony. But libertarians pretend that this continuum is a binary: either you consent or not. Life in libertarian utopialand will probably involve a lot of coercion of the powerless by the powerful, if not outright slavery.
I probably am doing a terrible job of criticizing this argument, which sucks because I am convinced there is something deeply exploitative about it.