Freedom to Dominate

Why Free-Market Economics Undermines Its Own Moral Premise

Peter Joseph is a filmmaker & author; host of the podcast Revolution Now! and one can support his work through Patreon.

Introduction: Sacred (and false) Ideal of the Free Market

Free-market economics is commonly presented as a realm of voluntary, non-coercive exchange between autonomous individuals. In this idealized vision, markets function as neutral playing fields where participants freely trade goods and labor according to mutual consent, guided by price signals and restrained only by minimal governance.

Regulation, when acknowledged at all, is framed as an impartial referee - present to preserve fairness, not to shape outcomes. Within this framework, markets are not merely mechanisms of allocation; they are imbued with moral significance. Freedom, choice, and merit are treated as natural byproducts of competitive exchange, reinforcing the belief that market outcomes are both efficient and ethically justified.
This moral invocation carries profound perceptual consequences. It leads many to regard market distributions as inherently pure, and any intervention against that “holy” outcome as somehow sacrilegious - as if the machinery of the market, and the manner in which it allocates resources, were the voice of God itself.

Historically, this reverence for market outcomes has repeatedly been used to justify material suffering as a moral necessity rather than a structural failure. During early industrialization, extreme labor exploitation—including child labor, lethal working conditions, and starvation wages—was defended as the natural outcome of voluntary exchange. Workers were “free” to sell their labor, yet refusal often meant homelessness or death. Similarly, during periods of famine, food scarcity was routinely treated as a pricing problem rather than a humanitarian one, with the maintenance of market signals prioritized over human survival. In such cases, intervention was condemned not as ineffective but as immoral—an affront to the supposed wisdom of the market.

Contemporary examples reveal the same logic in modern form. Housing markets are frequently treated as neutral allocators of shelter, even as speculative pricing displaces entire communities and renders basic shelter inaccessible to large segments of the population. Healthcare systems organized around market principles frame access to life-saving treatment as consumer choice, despite the fact that refusal or inability to pay carries fatal consequences. In each case, coercion is obscured by formal voluntarism: individuals are technically free to choose, yet materially constrained to comply.

Yet embedded within this religious narrative lies a profound and obvious contradiction. While competition is celebrated as the engine of balance and innovation, the incentive structure required for market success does not preserve freedom in practice. Competitive pressures reward behavior aimed at securing advantage, eliminating rivals, and consolidating control. And over time, these incentives erode the very conditions required for open and voluntary exchange. What begins as freedom of participation increasingly becomes freedom of domination as a natural and inalterable process.

This pattern is not accidental. Market actors who refuse to pursue strategic advantage—whether through consolidation, exclusion, or influence—are systematically outcompeted by those who do. Firms that decline to suppress wages, externalize costs, or reshape regulatory environments do not preserve ethical balance; they lose market share and eventually disappear. The logic of survival within competitive markets selects against restraint and rewards coercive leverage, even when such leverage contradicts the moral narrative that markets are said to embody.

This paradox is often dismissed as corruption, of course - an unfortunate deviation from otherwise sound principles. But such a naïve dismissal obscures the deeper structural reality: The freedom to compete becomes the freedom to eliminate competition. The freedom to trade becomes the freedom to influence, capture, and reshape the institutions meant to govern trade itself. Free-market economics neglects a fundamental systemic reality: competitive incentives naturally drive the accumulation of power, the erosion of fair exchange, and the capture of governance. Rather than preserving freedom, free markets, left to their own logic, reward behavior that restricts and ultimately removes the freedom of others.

This fact represents one of the most profound forms of denial found within libertarian free-market economics.

Orwellian Inversion: When Ideals Become Their Opposites

George Orwell famously observed that institutions often adopt language that signifies the opposite of their actual function. Terms meant to evoke liberty, protection, or justice are routinely deployed to legitimize systems that produce constraint, domination, or control. This inversion is not merely rhetorical deception. More often, it is structural, emerging from the internal logic of institutions rather than from the conscious intent of their designers.

Free-market ideology exhibits this pattern with particular clarity. Markets are presented as arenas of freedom: spaces in which individuals engage in voluntary exchange, free from coercion or centralized authority. Yet the observable outcomes of market systems reliably tend toward hierarchy and compulsion. Economic power concentrates, choices narrow rather than expand, and participation becomes increasingly conditional upon submission to forces beyond individual control. What is framed as freedom in theory manifests as dependence in practice.

This dependence is most visible in labor markets, where formal freedom masks material coercion. Workers are legally free to quit their jobs, yet doing so often entails the immediate loss of income, housing security, healthcare access, and social stability. Under such conditions, “choice” becomes a technicality rather than a lived reality. Compliance is not enforced through overt violence or legal mandate, but through structurally engineered vulnerability. The threat of homelessness, untreated illness, or financial ruin functions as a coercive force indistinguishable in effect from direct compulsion, even while preserving the appearance of voluntarism.

The same inversion is amplified in contemporary gig economy arrangements. Workers are classified as independent contractors—celebrated as entrepreneurs enjoying flexibility and autonomy—while being subjected to algorithmic management that dictates wages, schedules, performance evaluation, and termination without due process. Platform operators maintain unilateral control over pricing, access to work, and visibility, while denying responsibility for labor protections. Freedom is asserted rhetorically at the point of classification, even as control is intensified operationally through opaque and automated systems.

At the global level, this dynamic extends to international trade regimes marketed as instruments of free exchange. “Free trade” agreements routinely impose binding constraints on domestic policy autonomy, restricting governments’ ability to regulate labor standards, environmental protections, public health measures, or capital flows. Nations remain formally sovereign and voluntary participants, yet face punitive economic consequences—capital flight, trade sanctions, or investor-state litigation—if they deviate from market-friendly orthodoxy. Here again, freedom is preserved in form while coercion operates through structural dependency.

Crucially, this inversion does not arise from moral failure or the betrayal of market principles. It arises from the exact incentive structures embedded within competitive markets themselves. As actors succeed, they acquire disproportionate influence over resources, rules, and institutions, allowing them to shape conditions in their favor. The boundaries that are assumed not to be crossed are, in reality, purely abstract. The same competitive logic that drives a firm to maintain strategic advantage over rivals also compels it to engineer the broader regulatory and governance environment to preserve that advantage.

Market freedom thus transforms into freedom for the powerful: the freedom to dictate terms, restrict alternatives, and entrench advantage. For the majority, agency diminishes as structural constraints multiply.
If freedom is the promise of free-market economics, competition is the mechanism meant to deliver it. The question that follows must therefore be taken seriously rather than rhetorically: how does competition, in practice, produce balance rather than domination?

The Myth of Competitive Balance

As I have touched upon in other articles, at the core of free-market economics lies a largely unquestioned assumption: that competition naturally produces balance. Competitive pressure, it is argued, disciplines excess, eliminates inefficiency, and prevents the concentration of power. Bad actors are driven out, monopolies destabilize, and markets correct themselves over time. Yet this claim functions less as an empirically grounded explanation than as an article of faith. It is asserted repeatedly, but rarely demonstrated in structural terms.

When pressed on how competition is supposed to generate balance, free-market theory typically resorts to analogy rather than analysis. Markets are likened to sporting contests - level playing fields where participants compete under a shared set of rules, overseen by neutral referees who ensure fairness without shaping outcomes. Within this metaphor, competition appears not only efficient but inherently just.

Yet, the analogy collapses under even modest scrutiny. Markets are not secondary games, and participants are not players who can simply walk away when the match ends. Market capitalism operates as a condition of survival, determining access to food, housing, healthcare, security, and even social standing. The stakes are existential rather than recreational. In such environments, rational actors do not seek balance; they seek advantage. They have to.

History offers no shortage of examples demonstrating this logic in action. In the nineteenth century, competition among railroad companies did not yield a stable equilibrium of many efficient providers. Instead, it produced rapid consolidation, price-fixing cartels, and monopolistic control over transportation corridors. Early market victories translated into exclusive access to capital, preferential shipping rates, and political influence, allowing dominant firms to dictate terms to competitors, farmers, and entire regions. Competition did not discipline power; it accelerated its concentration.

The same pattern emerged in oil, steel, and telecommunications. Firms that achieved early scale leveraged predatory pricing, vertical integration, and control over infrastructure to eliminate rivals. These trusts were not accidents of poor regulation but predictable outcomes of competitive escalation. The goal was not market balance, but market closure—the elimination of uncertainty by eliminating competitors.

Contemporary markets replicate this dynamic with even greater efficiency. Digital platform markets reward early scale with network effects that permanently entrench dominance. Once a platform controls user access, data flows, or digital infrastructure, competitors face prohibitive barriers to entry regardless of product quality or innovation. Dominant firms can subsidize losses indefinitely, acquire emerging threats, or undercut entrants until they collapse. Here, competition functions not as a corrective force but as a funnel toward monopoly.

In survival systems, success is measured not by fairness but by durability. Advantage, once gained, is not relinquished voluntarily. It is defended, expanded, and institutionalized. Any system that rewards advantage will incentivize its preservation, including strategies that undermine open competition itself. The belief that markets naturally self-correct toward balance ignores the incentive logic governing behavior under conditions of scarcity and survival.

Market Capitalism as a Survival System

Because markets operate under survival conditions, their dynamics cannot be understood through metaphors of fair play or neutral competition on a preconceived game board. Market capitalism is not a symbolic contest; it is a material framework that allocates life chances. Market outcomes determine access to essential resources, long-term security, political influence, and social mobility. Participation is not optional, and failure carries consequences that extend far beyond economic inconvenience.

This reality is most evident in systems where market position directly governs access to necessities. In labor markets, once again, where healthcare is tied to employment, the ability to refuse unsafe, exploitative, or degrading work is sharply constrained. Workers are formally free to quit, yet doing so may mean the immediate loss of medical coverage, placing illness or injury not only at personal risk but at financial ruin. Under such conditions, compliance is not chosen freely; it is compelled by structurally engineered vulnerability.

Housing markets, once again, offer a parallel example. When shelter is treated as a speculative asset rather than a social necessity, rising prices and rents translate directly into displacement, overcrowding, or homelessness. Individuals and families do not “fail” the market in any abstract sense; they lose access to physical safety and stability. The threat is not inconvenience, but exposure. Market disadvantage here functions as an existential penalty, narrowing the range of viable choices to those that ensure survival, however precarious.

Debt structures further intensify this dynamic. Widespread reliance on consumer, student, and medical debt forces long-term labor compliance under threat of default, wage garnishment, or asset seizure. Workers burdened by debt are less able to organize, resist exploitation, or exit abusive employment relationships. The market thus disciplines behavior not through direct coercion, but through persistent material pressure that makes refusal prohibitively costly.

Success in early stages of market competition yields tangible advantages that accumulate over time. Firms or individuals who secure early access to capital acquire not only greater productive capacity but increased influence over supply chains, labor conditions, and pricing structures. These advantages translate into scale, and scale fundamentally alters the competitive landscape.

Scale produces cost efficiencies that smaller competitors cannot match, enabling dominant actors to absorb losses, undercut prices, and outlast rivals. It also produces political leverage. Larger entities gain privileged access to policymakers, regulatory bodies, and public discourse, allowing them to shape the legal and institutional environment in which markets operate. Barriers to entry emerge systematically rather than accidentally, narrowing the field of competition and reinforcing dominance.

This process creates path dependency. Once advantage is established, it compounds. Power attracts further power, while loss becomes structural rather than temporary. Those who fall behind are not simply outperformed; they are progressively excluded from meaningful participation. The parameters of the market are inevitably shaped by those who succeed in its early stages. This is not a deviation from market principles nor the result of corruption, once again. It is rational adaptation to incentive structures that reward durability, control, and rule-setting over balance or fairness.

Power Accumulation Is Not an Aberration—It Is the Outcome

A persistent defense of free-market economics is the claim that monopolies, excessive corporate influence, and political capture represent external failures—distortions imposed upon an otherwise healthy competitive system. History tells a different story. There has never been a sustained market system in which increased wealth did not translate into increased power. This relationship is not incidental, nor is it the product of isolated misconduct. It is causal.

Economic success confers more than financial return; it confers leverage. Market dominance allows firms to dictate terms to suppliers, suppress wages, absorb competitors, and influence consumer behavior. As scale increases, economic power converts seamlessly into political power through lobbying, campaign financing, and regulatory negotiation. Legal engineering—through intellectual property regimes, contract law, tax structures, and liability frameworks—further entrenches advantage. Control over information, whether through advertising saturation, media ownership, or narrative framing, shapes public perception and limits viable alternatives.

This leverage is not exercised passively. It is deployed strategically to engineer environments in which coercion is normalized and competition is structurally foreclosed. Regulatory capture offers a clear illustration. Industries routinely participate directly in drafting the very regulations meant to govern them, embedding loopholes, exemptions, and compliance costs that smaller competitors cannot absorb. Such legislation does not restrain power; it codifies it. What appears as democratic governance in form becomes market governance in function.

Legal regimes further amplify this coercive capacity. Intellectual property systems, originally justified as incentives for innovation, are frequently used to block entry, suppress competition, and extract rents long after productive innovation has occurred. Patents are stockpiled defensively, litigation is weaponized to exhaust challengers, and legal uncertainty becomes a deterrent to participation. The law itself becomes a competitive instrument, transforming formal legality into a mechanism of exclusion.

Supply-chain dominance completes the picture. Firms that control key distribution channels or production inputs impose unfavorable terms on suppliers and labor alike, extracting value while transferring risk downward. Smaller firms are forced into dependency relationships where refusal means exclusion from markets entirely. Workers face similar constraints: declining wages, precarious contracts, and eroded bargaining power become conditions of continued participation rather than negotiated outcomes. Coercion here is not imposed through force, but through the deliberate structuring of dependency.

These mechanisms are often framed as corruptions of market logic—abuses that violate the spirit of competition. In reality, they are its fulfillment. Competitive systems reward outcomes, not intentions. If survival and expansion are the objectives, shaping the conditions of competition becomes a rational strategy. Firms that fail to do so are displaced by those that succeed.

This produces a reversal of conventional market morality. Efficiency in production becomes secondary to effectiveness in control. The most successful competitors are not those who merely innovate or lower costs, but those who secure their position against future competition. In free-market logic, the most rational competitor is not the most efficient producer—but the one who can best shape the rules of competition. What is dismissed as market failure is, in fact, market success operating exactly as incentive structures dictate.

The Democratic Illusion: Regulation as a Moral Safety Valve

In response to the concentration of market power, defenders of free-market economics and even common actvists frequently invoke democracy as a corrective force. While markets may generate excess, it is argued, democratic institutions will intervene through regulation, taxation, and oversight to restrain abuse and restore balance. This belief functions as a moral safety valve, allowing the core assumptions of market ideology to remain intact despite mounting evidence of structural inequality.

Historically, this faith has proven unfounded. Regulation has never operated as a true, effective external counterweight to market power. It emerges within the same power structures that markets produce. As wealth concentrates, political influence follows. Economic power translates into privileged access to policymakers, agenda-setting capacity, and disproportionate influence over public discourse. Under these conditions, regulation does not confront power; it negotiates with it.

This dynamic is evident in the revolving-door relationship between industry and government, where regulators routinely cycle into lucrative private-sector roles overseeing the very industries they once supervised. Policy expertise becomes inseparable from industry interest, and regulatory capture is normalized as professional continuity rather than corruption. The result is not overt lawlessness, but structural bias; rules written, interpreted, and enforced by those whose incentives align with market dominance rather than public restraint.

Lobbying asymmetries further entrench this imbalance. Corporate actors command vast resources to shape legislation, fund think tanks, influence media narratives, and sustain long-term political pressure. By contrast, the public interest is fragmented, underfunded, and reactive. Democratic participation formally persists, yet its capacity to meaningfully counter concentrated economic power is overwhelmed. Policy outcomes increasingly reflect not popular will, but organized capital.

Capital mobility completes the coercive loop. Governments that attempt robust regulation, labor protections, or redistribution face credible threats of capital flight, investment withdrawal, or currency destabilization. These pressures discipline democratic ambition before legislation is even introduced. Reform is not debated on its merits alone; it is preemptively constrained by the structural power of exit wielded by market actors.

Regulatory frameworks therefore tend to be reactive rather than preventive, addressing harms only after they become socially intolerable. They are routinely diluted through lobbying, compromised through legal maneuvering, and selectively enforced. Even well-intentioned reforms are constrained by political feasibility, economic pressure, and the threat of capital withdrawal. The regulatory process itself becomes a site of competition, favoring actors with the resources to sustain long-term influence.

Democracy does not stand above the economic system as an impartial referee. It operates within the material conditions shaped by market outcomes. When economic power becomes highly concentrated, democratic processes reflect that concentration rather than neutralize it. The assumption that political mechanisms can reliably correct the structural consequences of market competition overlooks the reality that democracy itself is increasingly molded by the forces it is asked to restrain.

The Activist Trap: Reforming a System That Selects Against Reform

Contemporary political activism, even in its most progressive forms, often accepts market capitalism as an unquestioned baseline. The prevailing strategy is not to challenge the structural logic of competition, but to mitigate its excesses through redistribution, regulation, taxation, and social programs. These efforts are framed as pragmatic adjustments meant to humanize an otherwise efficient system.

Implicit in this approach is a critical assumption: that the market can self-correct through external intervention, and that concentrations of power can be neutralized after they emerge. Yet this assumption ignores the incentive architecture that generates those concentrations, once again. If competitive markets systematically reward dominance, then corrective mechanisms operating within that system must contend with forces that actively resist meaningful constraint.

As a result, activism tends to focus on symptoms rather than structure. Inequality, corporate misconduct, environmental degradation, and labor exploitation are treated as discrete problems rather than interconnected outcomes of a single incentive framework. Each reform, however necessary in the short term, leaves the underlying dynamics intact.

This pattern is evident in environmental regulation, where stricter domestic standards are frequently offset by the outsourcing of pollution-intensive production to regions with weaker enforcement. Emissions decline on paper within regulated jurisdictions while global ecological damage continues unabated. Market actors adapt not by internalizing ecological limits, but by relocating harm beyond the reach of regulation, preserving profitability while undermining the reform’s intent.

Labor protections follow a similar trajectory. Gains achieved through wage laws, benefits mandates, or collective bargaining are routinely weakened through contractorization, subcontracting, and platform-based employment models that shift risk onto workers while maintaining managerial control. Formal protections remain in place, yet the employment relationship itself is restructured to evade them. What appears as progress in law dissolves in practice through organizational redesign.

Tax reform provides another instructive case. Efforts to increase corporate or high-income taxation are frequently bypassed through financial engineering, offshore accounting, and regulatory arbitrage. Capital reorganizes itself faster than policy can respond, transforming taxation into a technical obstacle rather than a meaningful constraint. Revenue shortfalls are then invoked as justification for austerity, completing the cycle by shifting burdens downward.

This produces a cycle of perpetual mitigation. Reforms are introduced, power adapts, new imbalances emerge, and further reforms are demanded. Structural change remains elusive not because of insufficient effort or moral clarity, but because the system itself selects against reforms that threaten its core logic. Attempting to equalize outcomes within a system that rewards dominance is like treating symptoms while reinforcing the disease.

Conclusion: Freedom Cannot Be Preserved by Systems That Reward Its Removal

Free-market economics presents itself as a theory of freedom. It elevates voluntary exchange, individual choice, and competition as both efficient mechanisms of coordination and moral ideals. Yet by abstracting away power dynamics, survival incentives, and the cumulative effects of advantage, it fundamentally misrepresents how markets actually function over time. The system is treated as a neutral allocator rather than a competitive environment governed by asymmetric pressure and compounding control.

Competition does not neutralize power; it selects for it. In environments where success determines access to resources, security, and influence, rational actors are incentivized to preserve advantage, eliminate threats, and shape the rules of participation. These behaviors are not distortions imposed upon market logic; they are expressions of it. The result is a system in which freedom becomes increasingly asymmetrical—expanded for those who consolidate control and constrained for those who cannot.

Uniquely, this reality is often obscured by a recurring and deeply entrenched defense within free-market doctrine. When confronted with evidence of harm, instability, or inequality, theorists and analysts routinely redirect attention toward regulatory interference. Isolated or cherry-picked examples of government intervention—often framed as democratically motivated—are presented as proof that markets would otherwise function optimally if left undisturbed. The analysis typically remains superficial, focusing on immediate or localized effects while ignoring broader system dynamics. Even when such critiques possess limited legitimacy, they operate within a striking asymmetry: exhaustive scrutiny is applied to regulatory actions, while the structural behavior of markets themselves is assumed to be pure, self-correcting, and incapable of failure.

This selective analysis amounts to a form of denial. Market dynamics are treated as a baseline of moral and functional integrity, while intervention is presumed guilty by default. The possibility that competitive incentives themselves generate instability, coercion, and power concentration is rarely examined. Instead, market outcomes are naturalized, and their consequences reframed as unfortunate but necessary—while any attempt to alter them is cast as distortion or hubris.

The delusion can be clarified through analogy. Imagine a battlefield where the violence of war—the bullets, explosions, and casualties—is described as an act of God, an inevitable expression of nature itself. Any attempt to regulate weapons, restrain combatants, or protect civilians is condemned as an artificial interference with the purity of conflict. The destruction is treated as sacred, while restraint is treated as sacrilege. This is precisely how market fundamentalism frames economic outcomes: distribution is sanctified as natural and just, while intervention is portrayed as an illegitimate violation of an otherwise moral order.

This produces a final Orwellian inversion. Markets promise freedom, yet they deliver hierarchy. They celebrate competition, yet they reward consolidation. They frame outcomes as meritocratic while systematically privileging those positioned to influence the conditions of exchange itself. Any economic system that defines freedom without accounting for power will inevitably create the freedom to destroy freedom itself. Until this contradiction is confronted at the level of structure rather than symptoms, appeals to market freedom will continue to obscure the forces that quietly, and predictably, erode it.

Peter Joseph is a filmmaker & author; host of the podcast Revolution Now! and one can support his work through Patreon.