Essay Introduction

In “Bargaining,” Paul L. Poirot argues that peaceful cooperation in a free society depends on a simple but demanding premise: people must be able to say “this is mine” and “that is yours,” and they must respect those boundaries in practice. From that foundation, he presents bargaining as the market method for determining prices and wages—an ongoing, voluntary negotiation between buyer and seller, employer and employee, in which the right of refusal is essential. Poirot contrasts this voluntary system with coercion—whether imposed by government wage controls, cartel-like arrangements, or compulsory unionism—and warns that when “collective bargaining” becomes monopoly power, it ceases to be bargaining at all. The essay is ultimately a defense of competitive bargaining as the only reliable, peaceful method yet found for coordinating human effort while preserving individual responsibility, property rights, and freedom of choice.

Bargaining

by Paul L. Poirot

One of the first requirements of society is a method for determining “what is mine and what is thine.” Such a determination is necessary because there never has been available to the members of any society an unlimited supply of things which individuals want.

Production—which includes either the creation or the conservation of scarce but useful goods or services—depends upon an expenditure of human effort in one form or another, whether it be strictly manual labor or the mental effort of planning or any possible combination of the two. Most human relationships involve some kind of an exchange of property or services with intent to increase production or to arrange a more satisfactory distribution of whatever it is that human beings think they want. The way to save human energy is to store it up in the form of property. Property is primarily a time link or medium of exchange between past, present, and future efforts of human beings; it is the product of past efforts and the raw material of further efforts. Therefore, it might be said that the basic problem of social relationships has to do primarily, if not entirely, with the exchange of services. The problem is to find an exchange price or wage rate which is satisfactory to those who are involved in the transaction.

This is the province of bargaining in a free society—the market method of price and wage determination. Though the term “bargaining” is most frequently used with respect to wage negotiations, the concept is one which applies at every stage of the relationships among free people.

This inquiry into the subject of bargaining is based upon the belief that individual responsibility for choice is preferable to compulsion as a social regulator of human action.¹ Trying to fix the value of goods or of services through coercion of one person by another is an antisocial practice with all the earmarks of a master-slave arrangement.

If ours is not intended to be a slave society, then there should be no law compelling any person to offer his services to others. In a free society the individual may work for himself if he chooses. In that case, he sets his own wages, measurable in terms of his own personal satisfaction with the product he has created. But if the individual believes that he might fare better by cooperating with others, then he may try to find a market outlet for some of his product or services; he may offer them for sale. This does not mean that he has a right to force anyone else to buy his product or to hire his services. A free man’s responsibility to society is that he live and use his property in a manner not injurious to others. A free market exists only in the absence of coercive practices, either by individuals, or by minority groups, or by the government. A free market depends upon mutual respect among the participants for the right of each individual to the control of his own services and his own private property. If there is such a thing as a right to bargain, it derives from this respect for a man’s bargaining ability—namely, his life and his property.

The Reason For Trade

Individuals try to look after themselves and their families and their friends. They seek food, shelter, companionship, and all sorts of things. That is why a person works—to satisfy those wants. And the reason why people voluntarily exchange goods and services with one another is that such trading helps to satisfy personal wants. In other words, the trading of goods and services with one another is really a part of the creative or productive process among free men.

Individuals have differing aptitudes and skills. Some of these differences seem to be inherited. And we know that individuals develop their aptitudes at differing rates through training and practice. A person generally likes to specialize at the work he does best and doesn’t want to be told to do something else. But in order to live in his own way, he needs some cooperation from other people. And he bargains for that cooperation. He offers to trade some of his specialized services or some of what he produces, in exchange for what he wants from them. By this process, he soon learns the advantages of producing something which has value to other persons.

The bargaining capacity of individuals or of any organized group of workmen—as distinguished from the antisocial power of seizure—thus grows out of their production of goods or services which are valuable to others. That principle is basic to the personal practice of freedom. It describes a free market economy, and there is no other proven method of tolerating personal interests or allowing the expression of individuality by all persons within society. Whether or not the members of a society will conduct their affairs in a free market depends upon how well individuals understand this basic principle of bargaining: Earn what you want by giving the other fellow what he wants from you.

The Nature Of Bargaining

Bargaining means trying to negotiate a contract or to arrange a trade on terms satisfactory to both the buyer and the seller. That’s why it takes two to make a bargain, and only two—a buyer and a seller, higgling over terms. If it’s true bargaining, there is no interference by anyone else and no threat or suggestion of coercion or violence in any form.

Anyone who has been caught in a Christmas shopping rush or who has witnessed the operations in a public market on a busy day may question the idea that only two persons can take part in the bargaining procedure. At the time, it always seems as though several persons are involved. But this is merely an example of competition at work. The competing sellers offer their different lots of goods and services and the competing buyers bid for ownership of these various things. The presence of more than one potential buyer or seller widens the range for bargaining. But the actual bargaining is carried on between one buyer and one seller at a time, each of whom is free to accept or to reject the other fellow’s best offer. The whole concept of bargaining presumes that there will be alternatives from which to choose—alternatives offered by competition as well as the alternative of rejecting all offers.

The satisfaction from bargaining, whether it leads to a trade or not, lies in the feeling of each party that he has obtained the best deal possible without resort to force or fraud. Competition helps each person decide what is best. Since competition and bargaining are so closely related, the two ideas may well be merged within the term “competitive bargaining”—competition between persons who recognize the rights of individuals to use what they have as a means of bargaining for what they want. Mankind has never discovered a basis for human relationships, other than competitive bargaining, which so encourages a person’s own self-interest to operate to the benefit of others.

When a person voluntarily offers his goods or services for exchange, and when another person voluntarily agrees to the terms of the offer, exchange will take place. Both parties find satisfaction. It’s not a question of one’s gaining at the other’s expense. The exchange works to their mutual benefit. Both gain. How much will each gain? Leave that to the judgment of those who practice competitive bargaining and who are directly involved in any specific transaction. Trade occurs when both parties agree as to the price—when both see an advantage in trading. The terms of such trade are not anyone else’s business—at least, not within the framework of truly competitive bargaining. There is no third party; even the government is supposed to keep its hands off except where someone tries to substitute violence for free choice in the market. Any other test of fairness for prices or wages is an abandonment of the private enterprise system.²

The Right Of Refusal

One of the important features of truly competitive bargaining is that a person has the right of refusal. He doesn’t have to trade at another person’s price. A man may keep what he has if he isn’t satisfied with the other fellow’s best offer. Such a refusal to trade is quite a common thing in any market place. It is typical of the competitive system. It is a vital part of the bargaining procedure. It is as fair and just as the day is long. But a refusal to buy or to accept the terms offered certainly is no excuse for violent retaliation against the rightful owner or against any other person who might be willing to accept the owner’s terms of trade.

A person may choose to quit a job if the wage or other conditions of employment are not satisfactory, just as a shopper returns a can of peaches to the shelf if the price is too high for her. Yet the housewife, by that act, does not pretend to have acquired a claim of ownership to the peaches. The next shopper who wants them may claim them at the price agreeable to the seller. An unhampered market will function in exactly that same fashion with respect to opportunities for employment.

Competitive bargaining has brought many benefits to the creative and highly productive men and women of America, just as all men and women can gain if they are willing to assume the responsibility of being free. But freedom to bargain is being forfeited by Americans who do not perceive that such freedom is based upon respect for the rights of others.

The advantages of bargaining and trade are not to be found in the kind of collective action which calls for the suppression of individual freedom of choice. The only alternative to bargaining is compulsion. To exercise compulsion is to govern. In the final analysis, the alternative to competitive bargaining is government control—the government in command of all property and all lives—individuality surrendered to the state—compulsory collectivism.

The Right To Life

A man must have control of his own life before he can bargain. Patrick Henry said his life wasn’t worth living without liberty. And other men of that day wanted to be free. Each, of course, wanted the freedom to produce for his own use. But they also recognized that bargaining with one another might help each of them fulfill a wider range of needs or desires.

These men wanted a chance to try to get along with others in society by the peaceful means of bargaining. They thought that men could freely trade goods and services to their mutual satisfaction and progress; that it was not necessary to rely on force—either governmental or private—as the guide for human conduct; that there was something basically wrong with the old concept that might makes right. So they argued that each man should have control of his own life.

A person who has control of his own life may work for himself if he chooses. This is simply another way of saying that a free man has the right to reject the other fellow’s best wage offer. Not only must the person be free to work for himself, but he must also be free to keep the products of his labor and his bargaining—free to own and control what is properly his own private property.

The Right To Property

Private property may be the product of a job done to one’s own satisfaction, or it may be something acquired through voluntary exchange, or it may be something received as a gift. In any case, the tangible evidence of past production or service—the product of yesterday’s service now held as property—is as much a part of a man’s life as the services he renders today or might render tomorrow. So it is that your own freedom calls upon you to respect the right of every man to own property, for use as he chooses, just as you would respect his right to the life he fashions for himself with his own hands and through his own intellect. Life and the means of livelihood are too closely related for logical separation.³

A person must have this exclusive right or claim to a thing, whether it be tomorrow’s effort or property saved from yesterday’s effort, before he can use it for purposes of bargaining. Respect for individual rights to life and property is the basis of private enterprise or capitalism, a respect which does not exist under the various systems of compulsory collectivism. An individual can’t bargain in a collectivized country because he is not permitted to claim anything as his own; property is “owned in common,” which simply means that no man can say with conviction that any part of his livelihood—or even his life—is his own. There is little opportunity for competition or for bargaining with respect to anything which has been brought into “public ownership” through the compulsory processes of government.⁴

The first requirement for bargaining, then, is the possession of something which has value and which may be offered in exchange. How valuable is it? Well, that’s the whole purpose of bargaining—to find the answer to that question, peacefully and without using coercion against anyone. There isn’t any other peaceful method of determining the value of anything. Just bargaining! Voluntary trade in an unrigged competitive market! Any other system presumes that might makes right.

Employer And Employee

It is easy to lose oneself in the crowd at a popular market place. And the size of the crowd sometimes blocks out the view of the actual market procedure—the bargaining between one buyer and one seller. The employer-employee relationship, for instance, becomes exceedingly complicated if one looks upon it as a battle between opposing groups, or—as Marx put it—a class struggle.

The true nature of the employer-employee relationship may be understood by those who see that individuals are involved—two individuals—each of whom owns and controls something of value. These two individuals are not warring competitors; their object is cooperation in an honest effort to arrange a trade to their mutual advantage.

The employee is an individual who has a right to offer his services for exchange—a right which is or ought to be recognized by the employer. Labor, thus voluntarily offered by any person, is a form of property—his property—and he may offer it as a marketable commodity. If a man voluntarily offers his services for sale, that doesn’t make him a slave. It is simply an expression of his right to his own life.

The employer also is a worker who has a right to offer his services for exchange. In some instances, it may happen that the employer is also the owner of capital goods—land, plant facilities, raw materials, and tools. A man has a right to own private property—as much of a right as any man can claim to the product of his services. But whether or not the employer also is the owner of productive tools and facilities, he doesn’t create job opportunities for others except as he offers his own managerial services in the competitive effort to please customers. The manager offers his services, just as any other employee offers services, and the object of their bargaining is to determine a satisfactory exchange rate for what each has voluntarily offered. Their object is to combine their efforts to their mutual advantage.

The theory of the free market is that anyone who pleases may compete with other buyers and sellers. There are not to be any arbitrary barriers to competition and trade. It is recognized that many employees may be competing against one another for job opportunities. And the job-creating owners and managers of productive tools and facilities are competing against one another for the services of employees. The function of the market is to find a level of wages which will allow these competing forces to work toward a balance—a wage rate for every job which will satisfy both the employee and his employer without compulsion against any person.

That’s really all there is to bargaining, just trying to find that point on the wage scale which satisfies both the employer and the employee, and which will continue to satisfy both of them throughout the life of their voluntarily arranged contract. An employer hurts his own interests just as much by paying less than the free market wage scale as he does by paying more. His objective should be to find the scale of wages which just “meets the market.” And that is, or ought to be, the employee’s objective, too. The employee who holds out for a higher than market wage deprives himself of a chance for employment; and if he agrees to work for less than the market wage, he may thereby lose a part of his bargaining power as a consumer.

The Value Of A Service

Much of the dissension about wages arises from a failure to distinguish between the worth of an individual as such, and the value, for purposes of exchange, of the services offered by the individual. Among free men, the worth of an individual is not a matter to be determined in an economic sense. Certainly that problem is beyond the scope of this study, for we are not discussing the buying or selling of human beings. The purpose of bargaining, in this respect, is to arrive at the market value or exchange price of specific services voluntarily offered by individuals. A man offers to sell eight hours of his day in order that he may better utilize the balance of his day according to his own choice.

According to the expressions of preference in a free market, a higher exchange price may be offered for the services of one person than for another’s services. There is great variation in the productive capacity of different individuals. This is as true among so-called hourly workers as it is among managerial workers. The efficiency of the capitalistic system stems from its tendency to concentrate the management of productive operations under the direction of the most capable managers. So it happens that a good manager may serve to coordinate the productive services of a large number of employees.

The control of capital also tends to be concentrated in the hands of the best managers. The owners of property—and to a large extent, they are simply those workers who have spent less than they earned—sometimes find it desirable to pool their property so as to attract the managerial services of an expert. Stockholders thus hire corporation management—agree to pay a manager for his services to them.

In order to best serve the interests of stockholders, the manager must be capable of coordinating the services of many individual employees in a way that is sufficiently satisfactory to each employee to attract that employee from alternative opportunities for the use of his services. So it is that a good manager serves a group of property owners as well as a group of employees, all in the interest of better service to customers. He serves to the extent that he is able to improve the productivity of all the property and all the labor which has voluntarily sought his management.

Labor And Capital

In many instances, employees voluntarily purchase shares of stock in the corporation which employs them. This is sort of a double vote of confidence in the hired management. The hired manager is obliged to try to satisfy consumers and at the same time to look after the interests of stockholders as well as the interests of employees. If he begins to respond overgenerously to employee demands, to the detriment of stockholder interests, the stockholders may fire the manager or, at least, refuse to place any additional capital under his direction. On the other hand, if the manager thinks he can favor his stockholders by paying less than going market wages, he will also be mistaken because his best employees will begin moving to the better job opportunities offered by other employers. Thus, the market will not tolerate arbitrariness on the part of management.

A business manager, interested in preserving his own job, is obliged to meet competitive bids for the use of capital and for the services of employees. He faces constant competition from other managers. It is this competitive bargaining which determines a manager’s salary, an employee’s wages, a stockholder’s return on his investment. This is the market method of determining the rates at which free men will voluntarily exchange goods and services with one another.

Many persons seem to agree that the market method of price and wage determination is fine in theory. But they then reject the theory as being impractical, because they say we do not have conditions of “perfect” competition. It seems to be their belief that competition isn’t effective unless every person in the world is actively competing with every other person relative to the possession of every piece of property or to the performance of every creative task in the world. But to suggest that all of us ought to be competing as opera singers, regardless of our abilities or desires, is to take the whole concept of competition out of its frame of reference to a free market. Competition is as “perfect” as it needs to be whenever those who want to compete are free to try it.

Stockholders Are Organized

There is no room for a bully in a free market. The market can be destroyed by a person who will not respect life and property. But the test of a bully is not necessarily a matter of his size. The fact that a number of competitors have pooled their resources under a single management does not necessarily make a bully out of the manager. He can still bargain in the market place if he is willing to abide by the rules for bargaining, that is, refrain from the use of coercion. However, the pooling of resources by competitors has a tendency to worry other participants in the market.

For instance, many employees sincerely believe that when stockholders pool their savings to form a huge corporation, then the employees must organize to defend themselves—that a lone workman could not possibly bargain with a giant corporation such as General Motors or the A. & P. By this reasoning, the housewives of America ought to be organized to defend themselves when they go shopping in supermarkets. What chance has a lone, frail woman to bargain with the power behind a chain of supermarkets for her family’s supper? But such stores are patronized by women who lack organizational backing, yet show no visible signs of fear. If one storekeeper won’t bargain to a housewife’s satisfaction, she shops elsewhere—an elsewhere provided in competition for her patronage. She might buy some other product. Or, perhaps, she will buy nothing. And neither the stockholders nor the management of any grocery chain have the power to compel her to accept their groceries on their terms. Successful businessmen understand that “the customer is always right.” That happens to be the formula for survival in a competitive market.

Nor do the stockholders of a chain store have any coercive power over the hired manager of one of their local stores, beyond such terms as the manager might voluntarily accept as a condition of his employment there.

So far as the individual employee is concerned, he bargains for his job with only one person—a person who is in a supervisory capacity within the hired management of the company. That supervisor either needs help in his store or he doesn’t.

Job Opportunities

Let us assume that a store manager believes he could improve the net earnings of his store by adding a meat department. The customers want meat. The manager, then, needs the services of a meat cutter. And no matter how many stockholders may stand behind him, the store manager must either find a slave or else compete with all other employers for the services of a free man.

Let’s assume again that it takes a wage offer of $100 a week to attract a good meat cutter away from alternative job opportunities. If the manager believes that this employee can bring enough added business to the store to cover costs, including the $100 weekly wage, and still leave a profit for the store, then it is to the manager’s own interest to hire the man. If the manager doesn’t operate his store profitably, someone else will soon be serving the customers. It doesn’t make the slightest difference, so far as the dealings with the meat cutter are concerned, whether the store is entirely owned by the manager or whether the manager is in turn the employee of hundreds of stockholders.

Some persons, as we have observed before, want to abandon the competitive system of bargaining because they say there is not “perfect” competition. They fear for the meat cutter, and for other workmen, because they say there is not a “perfect” mobility of labor. And it certainly is true that some persons do not move as quickly as do others in response to an opportunity for higher wages. Home and family and church and community and all sorts of ties influence any decision to move. There may be a loyalty to one’s present job which isn’t measurable in dollars and cents. And there may be other barriers to mobility, such as seniority privileges and tied-up pension rights, which in many instances have grown out of a perversion of the free market. Both management and labor have been guilty of thus abandoning the market method of wage determination, and now the critics want to discard the competitive system completely because of those perversions. They forget that the market system, even in the absence of perfect mobility, has afforded individuals in America a greater freedom to move than others have ever known under any other system. Some of those other systems allow the “workers” no choice at all.

In the business world, if there is a job vacancy to be filled, it must be filled by an individual workman, a laborer for whose services other employers are free to compete. And if a corporation already employs 10,000 persons, and needs one more workman to fill a specific job, that corporation has no more power of coercion over an applicant than has a small business in the process of trying to hire its first employee.

The Risks Of Ownership

Approximately 480,000 stockholders have voluntarily pooled their savings to provide the tools and facilities which are operated under the management of America’s largest manufacturing corporation. Each stockholder is free to sell his interest in that corporation to anyone else who is willing to buy it. At what price? At a price agreeable to both. The corporation management cannot force any stockholder to sell his interest. Nor have individual stockholders or any combination of stockholders a right to force anyone else to buy their shares at a fixed price. Such transactions are negotiated by competitive bargaining rather than by force. The idea that there is a coercive feature to the “combined power” of corporate stockholders is an overworked myth. They can’t even “draft” a manager. They can bargain for the services of a man who will manage their capital for them.

The management hired by the stockholders of America’s largest manufacturing corporation offers employment to about 470,000 individuals—nearly as many employees as there are owners of the business.

Now, quite probably every stockholder as well as every employee understands that no one of them has a claim to the entire output of the business. They expect to share the product in some fashion. One of the problems is that no one knows the exact exchange value of this product until that figure has been determined by competitive bargaining in the market place. Meanwhile, someone must assume the risks of ownership of the product.

This corporation has no powers of monopoly pricing—it has competitors, actual and potential. So, the consuming public can’t be forced to underwrite the risks of loss. The employee who accepts employment in return for a specific wage takes few risks relative to marketing the product. Each payday the employee gets a certain return for his efforts, which he can readily use as a yardstick against all alternative opportunities for employment.

The hired manager, of course, risks his reputation upon his capacity to manage a business successfully. But the real risks of financial loss have to be borne by the owners of the business. As an incentive to bear such risks, stockholders expect to share any profits the company might earn.

The risks of ownership, whether it be ownership of goods or of one’s own services, are borne by the owner; that is the concept of those who believe in private ownership of property. If that concept is correct, it should apply regardless of the total amount of property owned by one individual, or the amount voluntarily pooled by several owners under one management. It also should apply regardless of the number of employees who might have bargained for the opportunity to use the property in order to improve their own productivity.

If 480,000 individuals have pooled their savings to provide the tools for use by any one of the employees of a corporation, that fact does not give those stockholders, either individually or collectively, any coercive advantage over anyone else who wants to bargain for the services of that employee. It would be quite another story if the stockholders should attempt to compel all employable persons—or even one person—to work for their corporation. If that should ever happen, one might reasonably expect the employees to organize a counter force.

The Worker’s Reserve

It is frequently argued that an employee is at a bargaining disadvantage when he seeks a favorable employment contract because he has less of a reserve to draw upon than does an employer. It is said that the employee needs bread for his family’s supper, whereas the employer needs nothing more urgent than a new yacht. The effect of such dramatization is to draw attention from the subject of the employer-employee relationship. The employee wants the use of tools and managerial services, and the employer wants the workman’s services so that together they may create something useful in exchange for bread, yachts, or whatever else either of them may choose to buy with his part of the product.

It is true that some employees have little except their weekly wages as a buffer against bill collectors. And if the loss of a week’s wages is that serious to a man, it may be a sign that he isn’t a good enough manager or, for some other reason, prefers not to try to make a living by working at a business of his own. Thus, he is in this sense dependent upon job opportunities created by others. But in a competitive society, a person is not bound to continue working for others, nor is he bound to depend upon any one employer for an opportunity to work. Some employees, of course, prefer not to change jobs; free men have that choice.

Unless competition has been strangled by coercive intervention, employers will be competing against one another for the productive services of employees. This competition between employers for an employee’s productive capacity is the thing that constitutes the employee’s reserve, just as the reserve value of capital depends upon the competition for the use of that capital.

In this connection, it may be interesting to speculate for a moment as to just how an employee’s reserve compares in dollar value with a reserve fund of capital. For instance, let us assume that the meat cutter of the previous illustration is a young man who might reasonably expect to find regular employment for a period of forty years at an average weekly wage of $100. For a nonworking person to draw a comparable income from a trust fund—assuming that it earns interest at the rate of three per cent and that the principal also is to be used up over the period of forty years—an original capital investment of $120,000 would be required. A person’s capacity for productive work is truly a valuable reserve, equal in worth to the inheritance from quite a “rich uncle.” A young man has quite a stake in maintaining the kind of a competitive society in which such reserves are recognized as being private property.

Unemployment Compensation

The fact is that a man who is willing and able to work does have a kind of reserve—in a sense, a better reserve than is available to the man who has nothing except money or capital. Robinson Crusoe could have salvaged the ship’s silver, but as a nonworking capitalist, he would have starved. According to the story, he saved his life by digging into his reserve capacity to work.

This same principle applies in our own kind of a complex society where each of us depends more or less upon exchange for his livelihood. If a man owns a million dollars, yet refuses to offer it in trade, he may go hungry, just as an employee may be faced with hunger if he refuses to turn his services to productive use. The market does not automatically guarantee subsistence to those who stop producing and trading while waiting for a better opportunity to present itself. An employee who chooses not to work may properly complain that he has no other means of support, but he ought to confine his complaint to the person who is solely responsible for his sad plight—himself. No one else has any right to make him work, nor any moral obligation to support him in his voluntary idleness.

The employee who wants to sit until an employer comes forth with a more attractive job offer may say that he doesn’t have the reserve to enforce his demand, but what he means is that he doesn’t have control over other employees who are willing to accept the jobs which are offered. To describe such circumstances as a lack of reserve is just another way of saying that competition exists.

Inequalities Of Fortune

The relationship between property rights and equality of bargaining power is primarily an economic rather than a political or judicial issue. But there is evidence that at least some judges have understood the relationship. When the Supreme Court of the United States reversed a prior decision by the Kansas Supreme Court, Justice Pitney explained:

“As to the interest of the employed, it is said by the Kansas Supreme Court to be a matter of common knowledge that ‘employees as a rule are not financially able to be as independent in making contracts for the sale of their labor as are employers in making contracts of purchase thereof.’

“No doubt, wherever the right of private property exists, there must and will be inequalities of fortune; and thus it naturally happens that parties negotiating about a contract are not equally unhampered by circumstances. This applies to all contracts, and not merely to that between employer and employee. Indeed, a little reflection will show that wherever the right of private property and the right of free contract co-exists, each party when contracting is inevitably more or less influenced by the question of whether he has much property, or little, or none; for the contract is made to the very end that each may gain something that he needs or desires more urgently than that which he proposes to give in exchange. And since it is self-evident that, unless all things are held in common, some persons must have more property than others, it is from the nature of things impossible to uphold freedom of contract and the right of private property without at the same time recognizing as legitimate those inequalities of fortune that are the necessary result of these rights. But the Fourteenth Amendment, in declaring that a State shall not ‘deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law’ gives to each of these an equal sanction; it recognizes ‘liberty’ and ‘property’ as co-existent human rights and debars the States from any unwarranted interference with either. The liberty of making contracts does not include a liberty to procure employment from an unwilling employer, or without a fair understanding. Nor may an employer be foreclosed by legislation from exercising the same freedom of choice that is the right of the employee.”

Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U.S. 1 (1915).

Real Wages

The free market allows a person the opportunity to be both an employee and a stockholder under a single corporate management. The market offers the opportunity, though it does not guarantee any individual an unlimited supply of personal ability or capital with which to take advantage of all opportunities. The fact that an employee has the opportunity to invest capital in the corporation is a protection to him. If he feels that the stockholders are getting more than a fair share of the corporate product, he may protect his interests by purchasing some of the stock. Most of the industrial corporations pay out in wages and salaries each year more than enough money to buy a controlling interest in their voting stock—if the employees wanted to use their earnings for that purpose.

Aside from the possibility of dividends, there are at least two other reasons why employees might want to invest more or less of their savings in the common stock of the corporations which employ them: (1) This is a proper method of gaining control over management; and (2) Such investments may help to increase the supply of raw materials, tools, and plant facilities which are necessary if there are to be more and better job opportunities. It would not serve the interests of employees if all corporate earnings were dispersed as wages, to the neglect of those who provide the capital. For that would inevitably deplete the supply of tools, the consequence being diminished employment opportunities and lagging production.

This is not the place for a full discourse on inflation; but, at least, mention may be made of the difference between money wages and real wages. High money wages depend upon an abundance of money which an unrestrained government can print into circulation. High real wages depend upon an abundance of consumable goods and services. Such abundance is the product of individuals working with adequate tools and facilities under the incentives of private ownership and personal freedom. How much a day’s wages will buy depends upon how productive and creative have been the efforts of individuals.⁵

The Consumer’s Role

In the foregoing analysis of the market relationship between an employer and an employee, little was said of the important role which each plays as a consumer. When owners and users of specific tools cooperate in a productive venture, their success depends upon how highly the product of their joint efforts is valued by consumers. The direct concern of the consumer pertains to the price and the quality of the product rather than to the welfare of any employer or employee who might have helped produce it. As a consumer, each of us tries to buy cheaply. We compete for the “best buy,” and thus encourage competition throughout the world of business.

An employee in an automobile plant is obliged to bargain, in competition against other employees, for the tools and raw materials he uses, but the fact that he is willing and able to help produce a finished automobile constitutes his real bargaining ability. And the value or strength of that bargaining ability depends in the final analysis upon what other employers and employees—consumers—are willing to offer in exchange for automobiles.

The purpose of production is to create something which may be consumed— which may have exchange value because it is wanted for consumption. If men of varying skills and with varying amounts of tools and other capital can improve their productivity by working together, let them bargain, for they have something constructive about which to bargain. But if they can’t work together to increase their total productivity, then obviously neither could gain in bargaining power except at the other’s expense. And life is too short for that kind of antisocial “bargaining.” The opportunities for personal gain by giving something valuable in exchange are far more abundant and more rewarding than are the chances of taking advantage of the other fellow and getting away with it. The process of voluntary exchange for mutual gain leads to growth and progress, while the process of compulsion is restrictive and deadly.

Reluctance To Compete

A person in search of employment usually tries to explain what he has to offer, hoping to make it sound attractive to the prospective employer. The bargaining ability of an individual is broadly recognized as depending upon his creative or productive strength—his capacity to be of service to others.

What seems obvious enough with respect to an individual’s bargaining ability often loses clarity when employees organize for purposes of bargaining. The organizational process seems to relieve the individual of a sense of responsibility for producing something as a condition of his employment. Instead, he claims a right to a job by reason of his union affiliation.

It is worth remembering that fellow employees are primarily competitors. They are competing for the services of a manager and for the use of the tools and other capital which stockholders have voluntarily placed under that manager’s supervision. And many of the employees are also competing for better-paying managerial jobs. This is the process of competitive bargaining which affords promotion on the basis of capacity to perform.

Competing is not an unmitigated joy to all persons. There are many who seem to prefer to duck such pressure when possible. They feel that their own lives might be more comfortable if they could only exercise a little control over others—enjoy certain monopoly privileges.

Monopoly Power

Monopoly power is the power to govern—to force compliance. Such is the power of a monarch over subjects who will accept the concept of the “divine right of kings.” People submit to such monopoly power because they see no alternatives.

The European cartel system of industrial organization is another kind of attempt at monopoly power. Supposedly competitive business managers agree among themselves not to compete for consumers. Usually, they try to persuade the government not to license any new businesses which might become competitive. As a rule, the cartel does not have the power to force consumers to buy the products of the industry, so its monopoly power fails if consumers decide to get along without that particular industry. If the private owners of coal mines form a cartel, they may say to consumers: “If you want coal, you must buy from us at our price.” This is a less vicious kind of monopoly power, of course, than that of a king or of a nationalized coal industry under which the taxable consumer is obliged to pay for coal whether or not he wants to use it.

Industrial monopoly is not generally a popular thing, as far as the citizens of America are concerned. American consumers do not like to be bullied in the market place. They want business managers to compete against one another, thus affording every consumer various alternatives from which to choose. If one seller begins acting like a king or a bully, Americans want the freedom to transfer their patronage to a more reasonable competitor. Thus through the facilities of a free market, consumers can put a bully in his place by the simple process of refusing to associate with him. Competition invites a bully to mend his ways, as a matter of self-interest.

Although the market is fully capable of handling bullies in this manner, there are always opportunists at hand who claim that the market process of control is inadequate, and that they have a better protective plan. They will point to a successful businessman and say: “See how big he has grown in the market place; therefore, he must be a monopolist. Join with me and organize a countermonopoly.” It is dangerous to entrust one’s own freedom to such opportunists, for they are potential bullies themselves.

There are strong reasons for believing that monopoly power is the major objective behind at least a part of the organizational efforts of employees in America. Any person who would defend the “right to organize” for such purposes of compulsion cannot place a very high value on his own life, liberty, or property. Monopoly is a power concept which denies the rights of individuals and which destroys the opportunity for peaceful bargaining in the market place.

One reason for believing that monopoly power may be the objective of some union activities is to be found in the measures advocated by many of the union spokesmen. If increasing their own productivity is the central aim of labor union members, that aim is highly camouflaged, if not entirely wiped out, by featherbedding, bogus typesetting, stand-by orchestrations, slow-down and makework innovations, various rewards for not working, fringe items not even supposed to be of a productive nature and in no wise designed to give added values to consumers. According to any reasonable concept of competitive bargaining, the foregoing practices can only be described as monopolistic interference with consumer choice.

Union Security

A second reason for believing that monopoly power may be the objective of some union activities is apparent in the nature of the drive for union security. Why does a labor union, or any other organization for that matter, need security? Security from what, or against what? And who is to provide the security?

Before examining those questions, it might be well to recognize the distinction between “union security” and “job security.” The former has to do with protection of the union organization through means such as the closed shop or the union shop. The term “job security” is more commonly used in the sense of “personal security,” the implication being that a job ought to secure an individual against the hazards of life, and that every human being has a right to such security as though he has a property right to a given job. This is the theory behind the provision for “seniority rights” which is to be found in many union contracts. Some persons go so far as to say that an employer who offers any opportunity for employment is under obligation to see that the wage he pays is sufficient to insure the employee and his family against every hazard of life. This seems to say that the so-called employer class is under obligation to supply a job to any union member who wants to be employed, and at whatever wage the job-seeker might ask.

In a competitive market each employee and each employer—as a consumer—takes the responsibility for satisfying his own needs from the returns the market affords for the job he performs. The market which reflects the judgment and tolerance of consumers, does not deny an employer the right to help an employee beyond the terms of their contractual agreement. But the market does not confer upon the employer either a responsibility to totally satisfy, or a right to determine, the “needs” of the employee. Such a transfer of rights and responsibilities from an employee would amount to his virtual enslavement—“job security” stripped of all its false wrappings.

“Union security” deals with something other than the personal security of union members. If there is any implication of personal security in the term, it has to do with the security of the union officers in their positions of power. When they ask for a union shop or a closed shop, with a check-off system for collecting dues, like taxes, they are asking for the preservation of their union organization and their own positions of control. What they really seem to want is security from a fear that their union couldn’t last as a strictly voluntary organization. There would seem to be a lack of good faith between union leadership and union membership—a fear that a majority of members might quit the union if given a chance. When a man asks for the power to collect dues from everyone, just as the government collects taxes, when he complains bitterly about “free riders,” he is saying in effect that he wants to govern individuals with a monopoly power equivalent to that of government.

Compulsory Unionism

A third reason for believing that monopoly power may be the objective of some union activities appears in the drive for a union shop or a closed shop. Competitive bargaining encourages men to act voluntarily in cooperation with one another, but not for the purpose of coercing someone else to act against his will. Though employees are essentially competitors, this is not to deny that they also have common interests which might serve as an object of cooperation. It may well be that a majority of the employees in an area want to build a church. Surely this is a worthy object of cooperation. Employees might also be interested in improving the safety and comfort of their working conditions—a project calling for cooperation among themselves as well as with management. There probably are many other objectives which could be cited as meriting the voluntary cooperation of competing employees.

However, the fact that a number of employees may work at the same place of business or within the same industry does not mean that all of their interests are identical. In other words, some members of a union may seek action which other employees deem detrimental to their interests. One alternative, under such a situation, is to compel the dissenters to follow the leader; demand what amounts to a closed shop, the union holding the power to fix wages and working conditions, not only for members, but even for those employees who might prefer to bargain individually. There appears to be no other reason for compulsory unionism. The object seems to be a monopoly power to push through an action which lacks unanimous approval.

No doubt many union members are led to believe that the purpose of the closed union shop is to bring pressure to bear upon the employer. But the means to this end is to bring pressure to bear upon the “scab”—that competing employee who would go ahead and cooperate with the employer if he dared exercise his own judgment in the matter. To thus force a man to join a labor union, or at least bow to its authority, as a condition of eligibility for employment in any type of work, or in any plant, or in any industry, or in any geographic area, diminishes that person’s right to live his own life. Compulsory unionization destroys the opportunity for the employee to bargain individually concerning conditions of an employment contract. Such compulsory unionization does to the individual workman just what the industrial cartel does to the consumer. One is as bad as the other, for each is a form of monopoly power.⁶

Industry-Wide Bargaining

A fourth reason for believing that monopoly power may be the objective of some union activities is apparent in the trend toward industry-wide “bargaining”—the idea that all the competitors, both the competing employees and the competing employers, in an entire industry ought to “bargain” through a single union.

The modern trend seems to be away from the independent plant-wide or company-wide union which used to be characteristic of the American labor movement. The company-wide union idea has been losing ground, and along with it is disappearing the “old-fashioned” notion that each individual has a right to manage what he owns. The plant-wide or company-wide union concept is economically sound in that it calls for the voluntary cooperation, not of competitive employees, but of two cooperators—the employer and his employee—who have a common interest in producing something which may be valuable to consumers. If a company employs several persons, it is necessary that their work be supervised and coordinated. The independent company-wide union coincides in scope with the natural bounds of business organization, and it has potentialities as a valuable part of the voluntarily cooperative procedures of competitive private enterprise.

This is not to say that a company-wide union will function perfectly or that it might never be perverted. Many independent company-wide unions have failed, just as there have been and perhaps always will be failures in any general field of human endeavor. The only point is that unionization along plant or company lines is not automatically precluded, by the nature of its organization, from functioning as a useful instrument of voluntary cooperation. A company-wide labor organization might attempt certain coercive practices within that particular company, such as requiring every employee to pay membership dues, or forbidding the employer to hire nonmembers. But the worst such a union can do, beyond its intimidation of dissenting employees, is to hurt the business of its own employer.

The company-wide union cannot lawfully interfere with any worker who wants to leave and seek employment elsewhere. It cannot regulate the hiring and firing practices and working conditions of another company, except by the noncoercive methods of successful competition—out-producing any rival organization. The seekers of extensive monopoly power cannot achieve it by means of an independent company-wide union; for that purpose they need industry-wide labor unions with compulsory membership provisions. This affords centralized control over all possible competitors in a given industry.⁷

Joint Monopoly

There is little point in debating the role of company management in the development of industry-wide labor unions. It is undoubtedly true that some of the business managers, who have not realized the ultimate consequences, have actually welcomed the “security” of industry-wide control over wages and hourly output per employee and other variables which might otherwise provoke keen competition. The compulsory industry-wide union can pretty well guarantee a manager that no competitor will be able to achieve superior labor efficiency. It is possible to believe that in some instances company management works closely with labor union management to tighten the grip of their joint industry-wide monopoly.

The consequence is that whole industries—all competing employers and all competing employees—can be called out on strike by one man who has a closed-shop grip on all manpower authorized for employment in “his” industry. Consumers can thus be squeezed between the alternatives of paying more or of doing without the products of an entire industry. Competition gives way to compulsion. No employer is allowed to continue productive operations; the union won’t let him hire employees. Nor can any employee stay on his job at the old wage, or bargain individually for a wage that might satisfy him; he, too, is compelled to strike until the demands of a single union official are met. That a union official may sometimes impose his will upon the consuming public without actually calling a strike does not modify the basic fact that such imposition constitutes monopoly power.⁸

The monopoly power which is growing out of industry-wide bargaining is the power to govern America. The union, in effect, licenses each employer to operate and guarantees him against competition—if the employer will submit to the union scale of wages and the other terms of the union contract. The bill for all this control goes to the consumer. The consumer, of course, may refuse to buy the products of a union-controlled industry, though the cost in terms of self-sacrifice may seem exorbitant. But there is a portion of the product of many industries in America which the consumer is obliged to pay for, whether or not he chooses. This is the portion represented by defense contracts and other government purchases. In these cases, the union leader, in effect, exercises the power to tax consumers. He is indeed the government.

In one other manner, also, the power of the government has been granted to the officialdom of organized labor. Taxpayers are obliged to provide unemployment benefits for those who have been forced into idleness by the tactics of exclusion which labor unions practice. This is monopoly power in its most terrible form.

To blame union organizers for usurping power and for exercising the authority which has been granted to them by law, is to miss the important point. The fact is that the power of compulsion cannot be thus exercised until it has first been delegated by our individual selves to the agency of government.

As the government increases its power over the individual citizens, this means a corresponding decrease in the personal freedom to compete and to bargain. If the government, either directly or through its authorized agencies of compulsion, achieves control of food, banking, transportation, steel, coal—the basic industries—it is then able to force individuals to its own terms. Those who depend upon the government for the necessities of life have lost all means of regulating that government. Such a government is a real monopoly, one to which an individual must pay tribute—or else. If the right to compete is lost, bargaining is out of the question. The noose is drawn upon freedom when “collective bargaining” comes to mean monopoly and tyranny.

A Labor Government

It may seem unnecessarily harsh and unrealistic to compare the practices of “big labor” with the practices of dictatorial government, but no other comparison is possible. There are only two basic methods of organization. One way is illustrated by the voluntary cooperation seen within a local church group, or by the satisfaction of consumers who patronize a successfully competitive businessman. This is the way of personal choice as manifested in a free market. The other way calls for the power of coercion—the force of government. And in such a struggle for power, whatever group succeeds is the government.

Those who lend their support to the struggle for compulsory unionism ought to realize that they are asking for a “labor” government in America. Donald Richberg has aptly described the situation:

“The present and future intentions and desires of the unions have been plainly stated. Their authorized spokesmen argued recently in the Supreme Court of the United States that labor monopolies through a union shop were ‘indispensable.’ They said that ‘workers can not thrive but can only die under competition between themselves,’ and that therefore union membership must be ‘a condition of employment.’

“They said that ‘the worker becomes a member of an economic society when he takes employment,’ and that ‘the union is the organization or government of this society,’ with the ‘powers and responsibilities of a government,’ and that union membership must be ‘compulsory upon individuals.’

“Thus it has been made plain beyond all argument that the goal of the union closed shop advocates is a complete monopoly control of all jobs and the compulsory submission of all workers to government by the unions.”⁹

In theory, a “labor” government would be supposed to promote the interests of laborers, but no “labor” government has ever worked out that way in practice. Every move to destroy the foundations of the private ownership and accumulation of property, on the humanitarian theory that property ought to be divided more equitably, has worked in practice to destroy the worker’s security—his right to the product of his labor and his right to offer his services as he pleases in exchange for what he wants. Such a compulsory socialization quickly depletes the supposed vast reserves of the owners of capital; and then the government finds that it must either abandon its position or else start digging into the working man’s reserve, directing each to the work planned for him. The history of such movements is too consistent to allow reasonable hope for any other result under any “labor” government.

Some persons, at this point, may insist that these evils will exist whether the government favors “labor” or not. And there is a wealth of evidence to support such a view. We know that the citizens of other societies have felt the yoke of oppression, as in ancient Greece and Rome, in the Russia of the czars and then of the Communists, and particularly in those situations where the church has held the monopoly powers of government. It was not a “labor” government from which the early American colonists sought independence.

Perhaps the truth is that governmental planning and compulsion, as a substitute for the market, is in itself the evil which wrecks lives and makes for bad relationships within a society. If so, then it is wrong to give any person, or group, or so-called class, the right to plan and govern the social relationships of individuals. The self-interest of those who work and of those who have saved and accumulated capital is not detrimental to peaceful progress within society; rather, the thing to be feared and guarded against is the reckless abandonment of self-interest to a supposed class interest with the power to govern.

And, if such power has developed and is being used to oppress other persons and other groups within a society, the solution would seem to involve the displacement of such coercive power, not with a new “class” of governors, but with a new reliance upon freedom. The lifting of restraints and restrictions upon personal choice—the freeing of the market so that each may bargain with what is properly his own—is the only assurance of justice to every individual.

Government Wage Control

Efforts at government wage control in the United States have proven unsatisfactory; and, of all people, perhaps the wage earner is most conscious of that failure. Such control interferes with production. It robs individuals of the incentive to produce because it forbids employers to pay higher wages for added service. Freezing wage patterns tends to freeze production in all lines of industry, which has the effect of stunting the growth of the economy. Such wage control destroys the market process of wage determination. It makes bargaining illegal. It rules out the only possible method of finding that market wage which best satisfies both the employee and his employer.¹⁰

These are some of the reasons why governmental wage control doesn’t work. And in a rising market, at least, employees generally seem to understand the value of the flexibility afforded through bargaining. If this lesson can only be retained, so that employers and employees will also recognize the advantages of wage flexibility in a declining market, then it may be truthfully said that the American people have made progress toward the prevention of mass unemployment. All that is necessary is that the employer and the employee cooperate to find a wage which is agreeable to both.

Bargaining Representatives

Any employer or any employee who feels that he is personally unqualified to gauge the conditions of the market owes it to himself to seek the services of a qualified bargaining representative. And a qualified bargaining representative will be one who understands that his job is to find the right wage level—the one which just clears the market without bringing compulsion against a single person.

Bargaining has indeed helped to provide many of the material blessings available to American consumers today. And some of this bargaining has been of a “collective” nature in the sense that one party to the bargain has spoken in behalf of a number of cooperative individuals whose common and unanimous interest is in a specific action not designed to hurt someone else. However, much of what has passed for bargaining in America has not been bargaining at all, but a kind of compulsory collectivism which prefers coercion to voluntary agreement.

Bargaining is not facilitated by a powerful membership organization of competitors, whether they be competing for wages or for profits or for anything else which is scarce enough to have market value. It is a highly risky thing to delegate one’s own right to bargain to any representative who pretends that such organizational control of competition is either necessary or desirable. A bargainer is one who cooperates with those who are willing; for that purpose, he needs no power of compulsion. He doesn’t need coercive control of competitors. Such controls are the tools of persons who will use force if bargaining doesn’t go to suit them. Those who are still free to bargain, and who like it that way, will think carefully before placing in the hands of others those personal rights and responsibilities which might be perverted into weapons of coercion.¹¹

The Eternal Struggle

Life always has been a struggle. Always, some of the people have had to work in order that they or anyone else might live. A whole society of nonworkers is inconceivable. The great social problem has been to determine how the products of human effort are to be shared within the society. And closely related to this problem has been the matter of encouraging as much production as possible.

Throughout most of the world’s history, the popular answer to these questions has been: “Might makes right.” Issues were decided by force, by the power of military might, or by the political force of majority will. Rarely, as in America’s past, have individuals been allowed to decide these matters for themselves, in the market place, competing and bargaining for the necessities and luxuries of life.

Though material abundance and luxuriant living have been the results of competitive bargaining in America, the people of other nations seem reluctant to practice such freedom. And, indeed, we in America seem to be abandoning our own individual rights to bargain, in a backward flight to the old system of determination by force.

The modern backward trend in this country probably is not deliberate so far as most of us are concerned. We would not consciously abandon the private enterprise system which has afforded so many blessings. But we are slipping backward, and will continue to slip until there is a renewal of understanding of individual rights and responsibilities under a system of competitive bargaining which functions according to the willingness of individuals to respect the lives and the private property of one another.

There must be self-respect of such a high quality that a person is willing to compete peacefully with his neighbor, each using his own skill and his own property as the means of producing or trading for the things he wants.

Professional men and businessmen and other working men all must realize the inherent dangers of binding themselves into special unions as a means of acquiring political power over other persons and other groups within the society. For when any one group becomes powerful enough to sway a whole society by force, then that force is the effective government of the society. The goal of government, no matter how nobly constituted, is to govern. A government with the power to govern in small ways seems bound to seek additional powers. Apparently it can’t help itself; it is incapable of limiting itself in the struggle for power. The limitation can come only from the outside. The early American concept was that individuals, in their desire for independent lives and in their respect for private property, would keep the government within bounds.

Those who promote and condone the principle that might makes right can have no logical quarrel with the methods which dictators employ. All such methods lead to the same end, and the fighting is simply to determine who will be the man in charge of that slave society. Such issues will be resolved by fighting unless individuals voluntarily choose to work and live according to the peaceful alternative of competitive bargaining.¹²

Footnotes (as printed in the essay)

(Except as otherwise noted, these are references to Foundation publications which are available upon request.)

1. To try to set forth here a detailed explanation of the case in favor of freedom might seem to involve too much of a departure from the subject of immediate interest—bargaining. Those who want a more detailed explanation may find it in the book, Liberty: A Path to Its Recovery by F. A. Harper.
2. The unhappy results of interference with the market method of price and wage determination are documented in A Just Price and Emergency Price Fixing by F. A. Harper on page 184, and The Price of Price Controls by Irving S. Olds on page 169.
3. For further explanation as to why the right to life and the right to property amount to the same thing, see Gaining the Free Market by F. A. Harper on page 93, and Property Rights and Human Rights by Paul L. Poirot on page 79.
4. The consequences of government ownership and control are further explored in Ownership in Common by Dean Russell.
5. Details of the process by which money is diluted appear in Inflation by F. A. Harper.
6. Professor James R. Morris of the University of Illinois in Chicago has offered a comprehensive analysis of “Compulsory Union Membership and Public Policy,” published in the Southern Economic Journal, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, July 1951. A case study of the compulsory or violent aspects of union control is presented in The Unstoppable, the story of the Harvester strike of August 21 to November 15, 1952; International Harvester Company, Chicago, Illinois.
7. Industry-Wide Bargaining by Professor Leo Wolman discusses the origin, causes, and effects of this trend.
8. Other valuable discussions of the monopoly aspects of unionism include: Iserman, Theodore R. “Unsolved Problems of Labor Law” in the Temple Law Quarterly, Vol. XXI: 334–356, April 1948. Also his testimony before Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, August 2, 1949. Machlup, Fritz. “Monopolistic Wage Determination As a Part of the General Problem of Monopoly.” An address before the Economic Institute on Wage Determination and the Economics of Liberalism, Washington, D.C., Chamber of Commerce of the United States, 1947. Scoville, John W. Labor Monopolies—Or Freedom. New York: Committee for Constitutional Government, 1946.
9. Richberg, Donald R. “Free Men vs. the Union Closed Shop” in The Freeman, July 16, 1951.
10. For a clear distinction between the methods of coercion and the method of the market place, see Two Ways to Stop Strikes by Leonard E. Read on page 205.
11. The danger of permitting organizations to speak for their members is carefully explained in the pamphlet, On That Day Began Lies by Leonard E. Read.
12. Students who would further pursue the subject of bargaining may wish to refer to the excellent book by Charles E. Lindblom, Unions and Capitalism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949.

About the Author

Paul L. Poirot (1896–1981) was a longtime editor and writer associated with the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and The Freeman. He is known for essays defending private property, voluntary exchange, and the moral foundations of a free society, often emphasizing the connection between individual responsibility and economic liberty.

Attribution

Poirot, Paul L. “Bargaining.” In The Freeman, 1954, Vol. II, 121–165. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.

Chicago-Style Bibliography

Poirot, Paul L. “Bargaining.” In The Freeman. Vol. II, 121–165. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1954.