Free the Market, Abolish the Wage System 
Under capitalism — as opposed to a freed market — the state makes the means of production artificially scarce and expensive for workers, and raises the threshold of comfortable subsistence, so that workers are artificially dependent on wage labor.
The state enforces artificial property rights and artificial scarcities, like so-called “intellectual property” (the source of the $150 markup on Nike sneakers that cost $5 to produce) and absentee title to vacant and unimproved land. It organizes the economy into oligopoly cartels, with “sticky” prices (probably a 20% price markup in most industries) and enormously inefficient and high-overhead production methods. It enforces entry barriers to self-employment by inflating the capital outlays required for production, through such things as “safety” codes that criminalize the use of ordinary household capital goods and zoning laws that criminalize household microenterprises. It impedes comfortable subsistence by promoting real estate bubbles and criminalizing competition from vernacular building techniques.
Economic exploitation is possible only when competition from the possibility of self-employment is closed off and wage employment is the only game in town. Just as the British state colluded with employers in the Enclosures to obstruct access to natural opportunities, modern employers under corporate capitalism use the state to enclose natural opportunities as a source of rent. The overall effect is to increase the share of needs that must be met through wage employment rather than self-employment or the informal and household sector, and to inflate the number of people seeking employment relative to available jobs. Hence, workers are forced to compete for jobs in a buyer’s market.
In a freed market, with all these artificial property rights and artificial scarcities removed, the situation would be reversed. Many people on the margin would leave wage employment altogether, each household would require fewer wage-workers to bring in cash income, those engaged in wage employment would have to work fewer hours to supplement their self-provisioning in the informal economy, and millions of people would retire earlier. Employers would find themselves forced to compete for labor, instead of the other way around, and workers would have the material means to step away from the bargaining table and live off their own resources while awaiting offers more to their liking.
In short, the state is the friend of employers and the enemy of labor. A freed market means liberation from the wage system.
(Source: anticapitalist)
