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Comment by vyodaiken | Hacker News Reader

The whole thing is incorrect. You claim "The U.S. came close to a free market at the time of its founding and has become progressively more unfree since" even though "at the time of its founding" the US economy significantly depended on slave labor and wholesale theft of land from Native American tribes. What kind of free market operating without force do you have when millions of human beings are under the lash? As for your excuse for the theft of Native American land, the inability of the native Americans to defend their property or to organize property law as Europeans did in no way makes the violent theft of their land some operation of free markets without coercion. As for women, look up "coverture" (https://ap.gilderlehrman.org/essay/legal-status-women-1776%C... ) Your whole story is a fantasy.

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> What kind of free market operating without force do you have when millions of human beings are under the lash?

Ironically, a far freer market than we have today, as long as you were white.

I don't think the economy of the North depended much or at all on the South. The South was in the business of exporting cotton to Europe. Also, the South was basically an economic backwater that was falling increasingly far behind. In terms of population, the North had 18.5 million and the South had 5.5 million free people and 3.5 million slaves.

> in no way makes the violent theft of their land some operation of free markets without coercion

I didn't understand before that your point about Native Americans was supposed to be a counterexample to free markets. I don't see it that way. A free market is about what happens within the borders of a country. Conquering more land is about expanding the borders of a country.

> As for women, look up "coverture"

I think you are making too much of this. According to your source, non-married women seem to have had the same rights as men. Families acted as a unit with the husband nominally in charge. I think that was reasonable for the level of development at the time and not as different from today as people think. Joint control of a family between husband and wife, as we have now, is only practicable when there is the release valve of divorce. Divorce would not have been very realistic in the 18th century because once a man has children with a woman you couldn't just take back your responsibility to her. There are a lot of factors that play into this like the lack of birth control, the need to produce many children to work on the farm, the need for there to be someone to raise children, etc. Modern technology is what has enabled women to be raised to the equal of men in practice, not just a change in the culture's view of women. Anyway, I don't think this issue is very relevant to the question of whether or not there was a free market.

>a far freer market than we have today, as long as you were white

Except for the iceberg, the Titanic sailed safely. You don't know anything about the economics of US slavery - which was enormously big business and affected the entire development of the US economy.

Your theory about stealing native american land is ridiculous. There is no free market if your economy depends on piracy. You're trying to use some legalistic card trick to pretend that something is not what it is.

Married women had no property rights: therefore they could not be participants in a free market.

You have a narrative totally at variance with actual history, but it fits some ideological point you want to make. You would be better off trying to understand why your ideology is so incompatible with empirical reality. The end.

Look, the point I made that started this conversation is that there is a lot of evidence in U.S. history that free markets work extremely well. You are not dealing with that at all. There are two issues with your arguments.

a) Most of your arguments are about freedom as such, not the economics of a free market. Slavery, women's rights, and native american land appropriation fall under this.

b) It's not a black and white issue. If it's 80% a free market, finding examples in the 20% does not invalidate my point.

> You don't know anything about the economics of US slavery

I know a lot about the economics of US slavery. It's fine to disagree with something in particular, but what you have said here is not a valid part of an honest discussion.

Plus, if you are so hung up on slavery, we could have just shifted the conversation to post-1865 and I would make the same point: free markets work well and that is borne out by history.

> Your theory about stealing native american land is ridiculous. There is no free market if your economy depends on piracy. You're trying to use some legalistic card trick to pretend that something is not what it is.

I don't have a "theory." The colonizers took the land. I don't think that affects my thesis. As to the rest of what you say here, see point (b).

> Married women had no property rights: therefore they could not be participants in a free market.

That does not follow at all. When a married woman goes to the market to buy produce, she's participating in the free market.

> You have a narrative totally at variance with actual history, but it fits some ideological point you want to make. You would be better off trying to understand why your ideology is so incompatible with empirical reality. The end.

This is not a valid thing to say in an honest discussion. I believe that you honestly think I'm being dishonest, but I'm not. Nothing else can be said.

We have let this discussion get the best of us---we should have stopped it several comments back. I know this is not appropriate for HN. I'm not going to respond further. I would go back and delete the whole conversation if I could but I think that would be even worse.

> Most of your arguments are about freedom as such, not the economics of a free market. Slavery, women's rights, and native american land appropriation fall under this.

There is no free market in labor under the rule of "do this work or I will whip you to death or worse." There is no free market in real-estate under the "we are going to murder your entire community and take the land". You have a misleading story about economics/government which only works if you discount the brutal grotesque treatment of captive labor as if the human beings caught up in the machinery of slavery don't matter. That's not just bad history, it is morally repellent.

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