Retribution not enough

[Ken Brown]

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