QUOTE(ConservPat)
Right. You don't have a legal right to a job, and your employment is contigent on mutual consent. If your employer no longer consents to your employment, you become unemployed. When you enter the job, you accept that principle of mutual consent.[...]Extra-contractual force. If we enter a contract that states that if you don't pay me X dollars every moth, I evict you, and then you don't pay X dollars...and I evict you, that is not coercion. That is contractual execution. Now, if you DO pay me X dollars and I evict you anyway, you have been coerced.
...but when a contract is open-ended like employment contracts typically are, they don't mean anything.
Pay cut: "Mutual Consent"
Fired: "Mutual Consent"
Without other legal framework, that is a complete joke.
History shows just how true.
I'll play Birmingham since I live here. It was a town built and run by the steel industry. The suburb of Fairfield as one example was a company town where US Steel stored its workforce. Blacks were paid lower wages on what was , literally, called the "race wage" system.
If you didn't like it, starve, it's the only show in town.
Ever read
Rocket Boys (the book October Sky was based on) or
The Jungle?
That teaches you what mutual consent meant.
Living on company land, payed in scrip, overnight you could lose everything, modern-day feudalism. Just like sharecropping, which most African-Americans can say is in their family history, certainly in mine.
QUOTE(ConservPat)
Not necessarily. Being better than America in the sense of race relations in the late 18th Century is not exactly a monumental accomplishment. If anything, the difference would be very slight.
Race relations went downhill from there in America for quite a while.
QUOTE(Wikipedia)
Faced with the intolerable conditions in the South, many blacks tried to leave. In 1879, Logan notes, "some 40,000 Negroes virtually stampeded from Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia for the Midwest." More famously, beginning in around 1915, many blacks moved to Northern cities in what became known as the Great Migration.
Whites had mixed reactions to the migration of blacks, sometimes encouraging it and sometimes (violently) discouraging it. For blacks themselves, however, life outside the South was often little better than life inside it. During the nadir, the United States as a whole, not just one section of it, became more racist. Having abandoned the fight for egalitarianism, the North largely abandoned the ideal as well. In the Midwest and West, many towns posted "sundown" warnings, threatening to kill any African-Americans who remained overnight. Monuments to Confederate War dead were erected across the nation—even in, for example, Montana—symbolizing the sympathy of the nation as a whole with the racial hierarchy of the Confederacy. (Loewen, Lies Across America, pp. 182-183, pp. 102-103) Black housing was segregated in the north, and, in many regions, blacks could not serve on juries. Blackface shows, in which whites dressed as blacks portrayed African-Americans as shiftless, ignorant clowns, were popular in North and South. The Supreme Court — which gutted the 14th and 15th Amendments by legalizing segregation in a series of decisions culminating in 1896's Plessy v. Ferguson—was made up almost entirely of northerners. (Logan, 97-98)
Racism in the North did not improve later in the nadir; in fact, if anything, as more blacks moved north, it became worse. In academia, eugenics and "scientific" racism gained stature (see Franz Boas). Even more calamitously for blacks, in 1912, Woodrow Wilson, a southern Democrat was elected to the Presidency. Wilson was a historian in the Dunning mode and an outspoken white supremacist; shortly after entering office, and despite promises to black groups, he introduced legislation to limit black civil rights nationwide.
Nadir of American race relationsQUOTE(ConservPat)
And I am pointing out that a truly free market cannot result in the violation of rights.
Define free.
This is certainly not true under a
laissez-faire market.