Many people, including many self-described 'conservatives', really want to recreate the European class system our forefathers rejected. Ask them why the secretary to the assistant deputy directory of marketing should make $300,000 a year, and they'll say "That's the free market. They were able to negotiate that salary". But ask them about the balance of exchanging wages for labor, and they'll say "lazy POSs! If they don't give us what we want for what we want to pay, the problem's with THEM".
The quiet premise that motivates that reaction is a hard belief in the entitlement to SOME other peoples' labor, a belief in a moral obligation for SOME to perform, but one from which SOME OTHERS are free -- allowing them to negotiate compensation for their labor, which THEY still own. It only makes sense if you accept there are two different categories of market participants.
The same thing happened after every large pre-modern outbreak of plague. The reduction of the working-class population created a scarcity of labor available for upper-class demands, creating a market which favored the laborers who were then able to bargain for better wages. Historically, this would make the upper class "big mad" (as is said, these days), and there were many attempts to force the lower class laborers to accept ancient pay rates which no longer reflected the inflated expenses experienced by the laborers themselves. The upper class felt genuinely entitled to have that labor and thought that workers who could hold out for greater pay were unfairly taking advantage of, well, economic reality.
The reality is that almost every political/economic policy question in the public domain relates to an underlying element of the human condition: People expect to pay as little as they can for what they buy, and charge as much as possible for what they sell.
This drives the world in which we live. Four key issues that need to be considered here are:
1. For most people, what they "sell" is their labor -- not a finished/packaged product or a well-defined service that is sold directly to a customer.
2. The system eventually breaks down in an affluent society because it's impossible to meet everyone's demands. As one Freeper astutely noted a while back: "You can't have $30/hour wages and Walmart prices in the same buyer-seller market."
3. The irreconcilable conflict described in Items #1 and #2 are the reason why slavery had been a feature of every human civilization in the past, and why "free trade" with many poverty-stricken countries is so ingrained in our economy today.
4. In a system with no slavery and increasingly protected domestic industries, the inevitable consequence is that more and more economic activity takes place on an involuntary basis where buyers and sellers don't interact freely. This is what drives massive government spending and corporate fascism in our modern economy. The society would simply break down unless people were obligated to buy things they have no interest in buying -- and at inflated prices that couldn't exist in an open transaction between a buyer and a seller. That would include public infrastructure, aircraft carriers, COVID vaccines, ObamaCare premiums, Medicare, public schools, etc.
This post is one of the best posts I’ve ever read on this site.