Happy Labor Day from some A-hole at Fox News

On August 29, Fox New's The Five ended with this:


This clip is particularly interesting in that it appears the commentator Eric Boiling, while expressing concern for the free market, apparently has no idea how free markets work. This is an excellent example of Missing the Point. What Boiling fails to understand is that in a capitalist economic system, labor is also part of the free market economy, and is subject to the same forces. When workers go on strike for better wages, they are using their collective power to pressure employers to increase wages. If there is no demand for jobs at the current minimum wage or workers refuse to do those jobs at those wages, free market forces dictate that employers will have to raise wages until they are high enough that people will be willing to do the jobs at the wages being offered. Rather than being a threat to the free market, this demonstrates exactly how free markets are supposed to operate.

As many commentators to the Media Matters post noted, it is interesting that the conservative (perhaps that should be modern-day Republican) vision of the free market seems to consist entirely of the view that corporations should be allowed to do whatever they want and take whatever they want with no accountability. Oddly enough, this is a view that is diametrically opposed to how truly free markets actually operate.