"Free markets" i.e. protectionism for Factory Owners

One of the foundational problems with the arguments of Republicans and right-Libertarians make now a days is the claim that there is some objectively defined "free market," out there in the netherworlds.  That, Obama has brought an end to the Free Markets championed by Reagan and is destroying our economy. 

Ha-Joon Chang in his excellent book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism put it quite succinctly when he stated early in the book "the 'freedom' of a market is, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder."  

For instance electoral votes, government jobs and legal decisions are not for sale (okay in some countries and even in the past in our they have been).  Should they be for sale?

Child labor restrictions are an infringement of the freedom of contract.  In 1819 legislation in the UK regulating child labor caused a massive amount of controversy, to the point that it ended up being tabled.  Called the Cotton Factories Regulation Act it would have banned employment of children under the age of 9 and restricted to 12 hours a day those between 10-16.  

As Chang notes in his book

The proposal caused huge controversy.  Opponents saw it as undermining the sanctity of freedom of contract and thus destroying the very foundation of the free market.  In debating this legislation, some members of the House of Lords objected to it on the grounds that 'labour ought to be free.'  Their arguments said: the children want  and need to work, and the factory owners want to employ them: what is the problem?"

The right of 8 year old's to work in what were at the time quite dangerous cotton factories, and the right of factory owners to employ them is one of "the beautiful things that free markets can do for impoverished people" and that socialist interventions by the government needlessly divert resources from market actors.

Communists like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and Anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin tried to undermine and destroy the fabric of our society by politically advocating and organizing against such practices as child labor. (In fact in the end these 'evil men' and many other men and women of like-mind took their now "proven wrong theories" and won out--at least in the industrialized world; which quite possibly explains the unemployment levels, not to mention the moral decay, and the proclivity of gays to want to marry here in the US, but I digress)

Child labor laws are an example of what many on the right derid perjoratively as 'smart' people," in Washington that "have an axe to grind" with factory owners and/or children and are imposing their hollywood liberal elite views on us from on high.  

The fact is, many of us, dare I say most will impose our ethical views on this situation and say that 9 year olds working in a cotton factory because their families needs their labor to feed them is a "market failure" and will impose nasty regulations that impede growth and restrict the liberty of individuals.

Some of us "smart people" neophyte  "social planners" will even go so far as to make the claim that keeping kids out of the labor market, allowing them to more fully develop and go to school is a market restraint that will actually increase growth and productivity in the long run because a more educated workforce is a more productive workforce.  

I'm going to guess that Republicans and right-Libertarians will respond by saying I am taking their words out of context and will point out that they believes in constitutional government and the right of people to choose (regulate) to ban child labor in this market; that we can in fact choose to keep kids out of the workforce.  

I hope they do as it make the case for those of us not drinking the conservative Kool-Aid helping to further reinforce the argument that markets are political creations and that "socialism" Obama is shoving down our throats is nothing new.  

The argument that Republicans make, that some forms of intervention are free market while others are socialist efforts to pick and choose winners and losers is fundamentally flawed.  In fact they usually go further and claim that free markets are "non-interventions,"--which is definitionally incoherent as all markets are set up via rules politically determined.  To claim that a rule is a nonintervention--even a rule that says "we won't restrict the trade in product x" is still a rule imposed by people--is just silly.  

One can come to the conclusions Republicans and Libertarians make, or even the factory owners in the UK made, simply by saying that "I support protectionism for factory owners and think that every day workers should be forced to fend for themselves because I think that will create the best outcome" but that is a tough argument to make and is not one that is truly free market.  Such claims are especially hard to make in places where we have democratic government and people elect others to choose the policies they prefer seeing implemented.

The free marketeers will turn to economics and say its about economic liberty in order to hide their socially unpopular positions, but hiding ones arguments behind technical terms doesn't speak highly to the legitimacy of such policies in a free society... especially one where according to advocates of free markets, the free flow of information is vital for fully functioning markets.