Nothing Is Naturally for Sale
The politics of the market.
There is a persistent belief in economic discourse, that markets are natural, self-contained systems that operate according to their own internal logic, untouched by the messy business of politics. Prices emerge, supply meets demand, and the invisible hand does its work, untainted by the flaws of human irrationality. This view is comforting because it makes the market feel inevitable. A law of nature, akin to the laws of physics.
But this has never been the case. Economics and politics cannot be separated, because markets themselves are political creations. What can be bought and sold, by whom, and under what conditions, has always been a matter of collective choice. What should be enforced, contested, and revised has always worked through political power.
In Ha-Joon Chang’s Economics: The User’s Guide, he argued that on many occasions political considerations preceded market activities, and contrary to the negative connotation of politics, those political considerations often improved lives instead. The child labor argument encompasses this argument the best.
Today, employing children in factories is illegal across virtually the entire world, and most people regard this as simply obvious. Yet it hasn’t always been the case. A market logic, taken to its purest form, offers no inherent objection to child labor. If a family is willing to send a child to work, and an employer is willing to hire them, a “free” market has no internal mechanism to prohibit the exchange. In fact, in 1830, around 37% of UK boys aged 10-14 years old were working (Our World in Data, 2024). Whereas it is currently almost illegal in the UK1.
What actually prohibits it is a political decision: a law, backed by the state, that declares children’s labor to be a category of transaction society will not permit, regardless of what supply and demand might dictate. The market did not abolish child labor. Politics did. Between 1830 and 1910, European countries and the United States gradually introduced laws establishing 12 as the minimum working age. These reforms were driven by an idea that first emerged in Britain during the 1830s: that children should have the right to be free from work (Goulart et al., 2024).
However, this example generalizes far beyond child labor. Every functioning market rests on a wide range of rules about what counts as a legitimate commodity. Human beings, organs, firearms, public offices, themselves are, in most societies, deliberately placed outside the market (Chang, 2014). This is not because economic logic forbids their sale, but because political communities have decided, through law and norm, that some things should not have a price.
On the other side of the coin, Chang also pointed out that there are some purchasable items that are not previously sold in the markets. Ideas were only commoditized after the advent of the patent law, and modern markets could even buy and sell the ‘rights to pollute’ (carbon trading). Only through political and legal innovations have these items been available for the market.
One thing to note, however, is that none of this is an argument against markets. Markets are remarkably effective at some things. They gather scattered information quickly and let millions of decisions coordinate without anyone directing them (Hayek, 1954). The problem arises when there is blind faith in the market. The belief that market outcomes are self-justifying simply because they are market outcomes, and that political interference with them is inherently a distortion of some natural order. This belief obscures the reality that the “natural order” was never natural to begin with. Every market boundary, what is tradeable, what is not, who may participate, and on what terms, is a political line, consistently drawn and redrawn.
Markets are political. That doesn’t make economics less useful, it makes it more honest. Every rule about what can be bought, sold, or owned came from somewhere: a legislature, a court, a movement, a war. Those decisions are still being made right now (often quietly) by people who benefit from us thinking the market just happened this way. The real work is dragging those decisions into the open, where they can be argued over, instead of letting them hide behind the appearance of economic law.
Only part-time work is permitted and is subject to strict regulation, with employment limited to the television, theatre, and modelling industries.