This simply isn’t true for the labour market, ignoring the monopoly aspect for the moment, workers don’t have good market information.
Worker pay is usually heavily obfuscated by employers so it’s almost impossible for an individual worker to accurately gauge how much they can demand.
Addition workers have very limited time and resources to spend on gather information on the labour market. How are they supposed to discover better paying jobs, or better industries without constantly job hunting?
Compare this to companies who in comparison have a huge amount data. At a minimum they know the wages of all their employees, they also have the resources to be constantly surveying the labour market and adjusting to it.
All of this compounds to produce a heavily skewed labour market, that skews in the favour of employers.
I'm going to guess in this case it's more the latter than the former.
A free market will not solve climate change as long as coal and fossil fuels are inexpensive.
A free market prioritizes one thing: Profit. That is all. A free market only solves problems when it is profitable to do so. Yeah, charities exist, but they typically aren't big enough to solve the big problems on a big scale.
> Profit. That is all.
Free markets also have intense competition so "Profits" that you talk about don't just go out of control - Prices are set at the intersection of supply and demand curves. Companies would need to shave off profit margins to stay competitive.
I think it is fair to say that there are no ideal free markets. There are always asymmetries, downsides, side cashing and a whole bunch of complexities in any market - nothing is ideal.
So, we should have regulations that control those asymmetries.
No, it's not.
Usually, that's covered by the adjective “perfectly competitive” rather than “free” modifying “markets”, but it is an aspect of textbook idealized markets.
Yes, but you can buy from anywhere other than Krogers and the cost of switching is almost negligible. A job is very, very different in that regard.
Responding to your edit:
> As wages in one particular area increase, people respond to that price signal by learning the relevant skills and working in that field and getting greater salaries.
Learning the relevant skills costs time and money. If your wage is too low, you won't be able to learn new skills. And moving and changing jobs is not that easy for most people.
It doesn't matter who I buy from, I need food much more than any retailer needs my business. I can sell my labour to many different companies with a relatively low switching cost. The average time people between jobs is lower than it has ever been.
Learning the relevant skills costs time and money. If your wage is too low, you won't be able to learn new skills. And moving and changing jobs is not that easy for most people.
If the price of steel increased, building new mines to extract iron ore would cost great sums of money as well. It is not easy for all mining companies to do this. It doesn't mean that the market is not relying on price signals to coordinate the production of goods.
Well, I disagree on this. Maybe you specifically can do it, but housing prices, healthcare costs, transport cost, family charges, etc, can make the cost and risk of switching prohibitive. Not to mention that "just switching" doesn't mean prices will be better. Just have a look at the latest stats on working poor people to imagine whether those can easily switch jobs and get better education.
> If the price of steel increased, building new mines to extract iron ore would cost great sums of money as well. It is not easy for all mining companies to do this. It doesn't mean that the market is not relying on price signals to coordinate the production of goods.
So there's a high cost of entry? That's very much a non-perfect market. A free market doesn't just "respond to price signals", that's a very low threshold as you'll hardly find a market that doesn't respond in any way to price changes. A free market has to respond to them in an elastic way.
Many people stay in jobs they don't like or that don't pay enough because they need the healthcare or don't have the resources (including time) to learn new skills and move to a higher paying job. So the fact that people can't freely respond to price signals means that it is not a free market.
A free market means that the distribution and production of goods and services do not rely on centralized planning, but on price signals.
As for being stuck in a job for health or skill reasons, those are choices, crappy choices but still free choices.
Universal Healthcare would, IMO, do more for the worker than a nominal pay-rise. The link between employment and healthcare is an abomination.
And that what's skewed here: as a (low-income) labourer, I often don't have all that much choice but to say "yes" since my bargaining power and alternatives are extremely limited. Often times people can't really "compare options".
That's one definition but it's not one of the more common ones.
It also begs the question what counts as a centralized planner. Does Boeing count if it sets the price of jet planes that only it and Airbus sell? What about when Singapore fixes the price of medical care even though anybody who wants can cross the border to have it done? Or Venezuela that fixes the price of its own money - at a rate literally nobody pays?
Remove the state and there are still many things that can go wrong with a market. Price signals become a way of laundering this fact past a certain point.
In what sense is a market with price controls absolutely a free market?
A free market means that the supply and demand of goods rely on price signals rather than a centralized planner. Labour is absolutely a free market. As wages in one particular area increase, people respond to that price signal by learning the relevant skills and working in that field and getting greater salaries. It's also why Amazon (and essentially no business) pay $7.25 an hour, even though they legally could.