David Honig wrote:
No one forces a farmer to the city to look for an industrial job.
In general, no. But it happens now and again. Governments certainly did in (say) the old Soviet Union (until they changed tactic and starting forcing them out of the city again). And in wartime almost everybody tries it. Some bits of the British Empire used "hut taxes" which were never intended to raise significant revenue to force self-sufficient farmers into paid employment. (Also of course they hit harder on African families, used to living in small compounds of separate huts each equivalent to a room in a European house) There have been plenty of situations where are worker is not free to choose employment or to leave employment. Everything from outright slavery to various tricks with company stores and debt bondage. And if someone comes along with an army, conquers the country and says "we own the land now, work for us or starve" most people will "choose" not to starve. And if they then bring in pass cards and closed borders and internal passports. most people will be unable to leave. That was true until very recently in many places: the old Soviet Union, apartheid South Africa, parts of colonial south-east Asia, and for Indians at least in some parts of Central America. Would you want to bet that it is no longer true anywhere? It's trivial that free trade is better for poor people (usual disclaimer: "on the whole, other things being equal, in the medium term" - it is easy to invent a situation in which some people, in some circumstances, will be worse off permanently, or in which almost everybody is worse of for a while. There are going to be losers as well as winners). But it is not trivial to assume that international fee trade, or free trade between corporations, is always the same as freedom for individuals. There can be "free" trade between slave-holding corporations, like an old Soviet industrial enterprise trading with the West. The bosses might be free, the slaves wouldn't. Where local arrangements confiscate land and property and pass them into the hands of states, or organised criminals, or corporations, or individuals; then someone choosing to work rather than starve is not, exactly, free. When the state makes the laws, and the state is controlled by those who are already powerful, then the laws may be written to suit the confiscators, and confiscation may be easily disguised by legality. That can be as true for a plantation in a "capitalist" country as for a collective farm in a "communist" one. Ken