Checking in on the new working class Republican Party
By 
American reactionaries aren’t pro-“free market,” just anti-worker, which you can see in their opposition to bans on non-compete clauses:
On the substance of the issue, meanwhile, the Journal offers a combination of outright falsehoods and hand-waving. The paper writes, “Job mobility in America hasn’t suffered despite non-compete clauses”; in fact, labor mobility has steadily declined in the U.S. since the 1980s. The Journal asserts that noncompetes “encourage innovation” in the tech sector but declines to grapple with any of the evidence to the contrary, including … the entirety of Silicon Valley: If noncompete agreements are required for innovation, it is rather odd that America’s high-tech sector is headquartered in a state that has prohibited noncompete agreements since the late 19th century.
To be sure, the fact that conservatives have made weak arguments against the FTC’s rule does not mean their avowed commitment to free markets is disingenuous. As noted above, one can theoretically reconcile opposition to the FTC proposal with support for free markets by insisting that the former violates freedom of contract. As Lincicome argued on Twitter, “in general, policy should have a strong, general presumption AGAINST government intrusion into private transactions.”
Yet the right does not honor that principle with any consistency. When Vedder championed “the right to sell one’s labor services without attenuation” for Cato in 2010, he did so in the name of supporting “right to work” laws. Such laws intrude on private transactions between businesses and workers. In states without right-to-work laws, unionized laborers and firms have the right to freely enter into contracts that require all of a firm’s workers to pay fees that cover the unions’ costs of bargaining, a.k.a. “agency fees.” This is critical for maintaining unions’ finances: If workers are allowed to secure the benefits of collective bargaining (which generally include the services of union lawyers) without paying for them, free riders can drain the union’s funds.
In states without right-to-work laws, workers who detest unions can still choose not to work at firms with such contracts. If they take a job at such a firm anyway, then they’ve freely entered into a labor agreement that mandates paying fees to a union. Yet, in that case, the Cato Institute believes the freedom of contract must be subordinated to the worker’s abstract economic right to sell their labor services however they see fit. In other words: When employers leverage their bargaining power to impose noncompete clauses on workers, we must not intrude upon their freedom of contract. When unionized workers leverage their bargaining power to impose agency fees on free riders, however, the government must intervene to ban such work arrangements.
This is a strange pair of positions for a political movement impartially committed to free-market ideals. It is a quite natural one, however, for a movement principally devoted to perpetuating the economic domination of business owners and bosses.
When markets get in the way of worker domination, to Republicans it’s always the latter that must prevail. And while Republicans sometimes oppose corporate interests, it’s never to protect workers, but because of other core Republican principles like “only rich people should have health insurance” or “queer people should not be treated with dignity.”