> employers can afford to wait for a given worker's labor prices to come down
So employers can wait.
> is affirmative evidence that the labor market is free
For employers.
> whereas the OP considers this evidence that the labor market is unfree
For employees - they can't wait (that much), see above.
That seriously underestimates the cost of a business being idle. Ample evidence for that is the devastation wreaked on businesses from the recent lockdowns.
Individually, with any positive level of unemployment, any one worker's nonparticipation is mooted by a ready waiting pool of available workers. Eventually the hold-out gets hungry. Or starves.
Blacklists operate similarly: businesses can afford the exclusion, the (unorganised) excluded cannot.
[I]n every part of Europe, twenty workmen serve under a master for one that is independent... What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour.
It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen....
-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...
As for blacklists, there are solutions. Blacklisted people can join together and start their own enterprises. One of the nice things about a free market is you can't stop people from doing that.
The five following are the principal circumstances which, so far as I have been able to observe, make up for a small pecuniary gain in some employments, and counterbalance a great one in others: first, the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employments themselves; secondly, the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them; thirdly, the constancy or inconstancy of employment in them; fourthly, the small or great trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them; and, fifthly, the probability or improbability of success in them.
Ibid., Book 1, Chapter 10
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...
> One of the nice things about a free market is you can't stop people from doing that.
The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it.
Ibid., Book1, Chaper 8. Immediately follows my first cite.
Notice how they used the law to prevent the free market from operating. They had to use the law because the free market did work around it.
Ibid., Book 1, Chapter 5.
Who buys and sells those guns? Using what currency? And do you really want to kick the hornets' nest of slaver repressions, traders, anti-union violence, including multiple open wars, range wars, the Johnson County War, the Great Potato Famine, Opium War, British occupation of India, China, Egypt, Palestine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? All in the name of commerce and markets.
I'll let you find the passages in Smith yourself where he talks of the joint-stock-company created and operated garrisons in India, Africa, and the Americas.
And just to preempt a likely upcoming reference to Weber, his famous [hrase has three conditions, not one: it conerns the monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
Absent government, what is lost isn't violence, but the monopoly on legitimacy. Ony entity that succeeds in reimposing that monopoly is by the definition a government, and absent monopoly or legitimacy what remains is illegitimate and/or multiparty violence.
(A nominal government itself may lose its claim to legitimacy, as recent public protests in the US and elsewhere have suggested).
You've managed to have numerous horses shot from under you with no apparent grieving on your part in this exchange. In sympathy with the horses, I think I've pursued this as far as I care to.
But you might care to examine your premises and their foundations a bit more carefully.
If other people are using force, that is a failure of the government, not of free markets.
Wars, for example, are not free market operations, even if they are done "in the name of".
The OP's position is IMO wrong in that (rational) employers aren't incentivized to wait for the absolute lowest-price worker because of opportunity cost. Consider the example of a successful restaurant looking to fill the role of 'marketer'. The company is already profitable and could continue indefinitely without filling the role. However, the company is looking to fill this role precisely because it believes that it stands to profit a lot, and every day that the role goes unfilled they're losing out on that profit. So here the worker has some leverage. Further, the restaurant isn't the only game in town, the worker can have offers from multiple employers and parlay them against each other for still better offers. The wage ultimately depends on the size of the opportunity (the company won't pay the marketer 100% of the opportunity or it won't be worth hiring them) and the supply of marketers. Ultimately, the restaurant wants to hire the least-expensive marketer (ignoring variance in worker quality for sake of argument) without waiting too long (losing out on the opportunity). This is what a free market looks like--the OP is arguing that because an employer can theoretically avoid bankruptcy indefinitely without filling the position that the market is not free, but I think they misunderstand what "free market" means.