This is a nice example why free markets are not optimal, zero regulation is not the best amount of regulation.
1. The government froze wages in WW2, and companies got around that by offering free health insurance.
2. Unions often got the government to force workers to join the union, because otherwise workers would undercut the union.
3. There were numerous attempts to fix wages of black laborers artificially low after the Civil War, they would constantly fall apart because individual farmers would pay more under the table to attract better workers. See "The Strange Career of Jim Crow".
4. Government "price supports" are there because of the consistent failure of farmers to voluntarily comply with price fixing agreements.
If you look long enougth you can find some cartels and monopolys that are stable for some time. Even when most of these where not able to really raise prices where far.
If you look at goverment enforcment of cartel and monopolys you will find a unbelivable amount. If you add tarrifs to that (ie blocking import of steel from japan). You will find that regulation far more often helps big buissness.
This is what people dont understand about free marketers. I do not belive that it is impossible for goverment action to imporove short run and maybe even long run conditions, but I belive it is far more like that this power is misused.
So yes you can go out of your way and figure out some asymetiric cost for whatever groupe you like. You can then go on and argue that in order to rebalance this the state needs to do 'something' (perfeclty show in the thread by all the people point out that employes can easly switch jobs and therefore there wage is below equillibrum). Stigliz for the win. This all works out great in theory but runs flat against a wall in practice. When it does run against a wall its of course just because of 'republicans' blocking all sencible policy or whatever.
So this is the reason for free market views, it is not as some people seam to belive that 'the free market is always perfect'.
The question to ask here is why do you think your preferred outcome is better than mine and what gives you right to force it on me.
Kill the regulations helping the capitalists, not just the ones giving a hand to the worker, and then we can talk.
http://www.freetheworld.com/2013/EFW2013-complete.pdf (Page 22)
And in any case, if my position was opposed to yours, that argument wouldn't convince me anyway, since I find "economic size" and particularly "growth" to be little more than fetishes of mainstream ideologues. I'm much more easily convinced by what the economists call "consumer surplus", though I'd rather know the "worker surplus".
Like I said, its just the thing that I start with, just this statistic would not convince me either.
That seems like the sort of evidence that's actually useful when making policy decisions about whether we should increase or decrease regulation. Abolishing all regulations is not practical, so what political theorists think would happen in a complete absence of regulation is irrelevant to any real-world issues.
But in any case, if you think what would happen by abolishing all regulation is irrelevant to the real world, then you should be replying to RivieraKid, who was the one drawing such irrelevant (and, in my opinion, unsupported) conclusions.