Phew this went somewhere entirely different than I thought it would when I wrote the first paragraph. My original point was going to be that freedom of market wasn’t the ingredient that allowed standards of living to increase in anything like tandem. It was freedom of society. As our “rising tide” lifted all boats, our economic policies mostly resembled socialist countries’, and their effectiveness was mostly attributable to living in a society where you don’t get dead or put in prison or similarly punished for advocating things you think would improve your life or the lives of those with whom you have solidarity. That’s still true. The free market is an awful vessel for that. And there’s no reason to conflate social freedom with it, if anything there’s every reason to assume unfettered market freedom loves social constraint.
The free market is orthogonal to other measures of freedom like democracy. Voting rights are not required for free market to deliver prosperity, as China has demonstrated.
> there’s every reason to assume unfettered market freedom loves social constraint.
I don't know where that came from. I don't see any such relationship.
> where you don’t get dead or put in prison or similarly punished for advocating things you think would improve your life or the lives of those with whom you have solidarity. That’s still true. The free market is an awful vessel for that.
I'm not sure what you're thinking a free market is. A free market, to be a free market, does not put people in prison for improving their lives.
> The free market is orthogonal to other measures of freedom like democracy.
To the extent it is, it’s a failure which erodes or prevents those freedoms from thriving.
> A free market, to be a free market, does not put people in prison for improving their lives.
I was going to invite you to learn more about labor history in the US, but…
> as China has demonstrated.
Never mind, you clearly already understand the point that a state which has mass forced labor camps is compatible with what’s called a free market. But you certainly can’t say no one’s imprisoned with a straight face.
