Here

Excerpts:

What workers need is greater bargaining power, and that comes primarily from having options. Unfortunately, the corporate state, which people mistake for the free market, closes off options. Anything less than removal of these obstacles is a cruel hoax on those seeking better lives.

Government aggravates an already bad situation anytime it erects artificial barriers to employment alternatives, including self-employment. But governments at all levels do this routinely, usually by protecting the well-connected from market competition.

How so? I couldn’t possibly count the ways here. But we can mention the most common: Occupational licensing restricts entry into many kinds of work by raising the cost of going into business. Zoning restrictions prevent people from using their homes for commercial purposes. Restrictions on street vendors and cabbies quash small-scale entrepreneurship. Intellectual-property law inhibits or harasses those whose products might be construed as violating patents or copyrights. Government land holdings make land artificially more costly. Taxes and regulations impose greater burdens on would-be entrepreneurs than on large, established businesses.

All this and more shrink the options of those with limited skills and meager resources, forcing them to vie with one another for the remaining, perhaps less-desirable jobs with reduced bargaining power. This gives an unfair advantage to employers, who know there are others eager to take the place of any “troublesome” worker.

Here are some related passages from Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know:

The progressive left often complains that corporations are too big. However, libertarians say, the left’s favored policies distort the market in favor of larger and larger corporations. The more we regulate the economy, the bigger Big Business will tend to be. Complying with regulations costs money and time. The larger your company is, the more easily you can keep up with the rules. The US Small Business Administration—a government agency—reports that complying with all regulations costs firms on average $10,585. However, these costs are not evenly dispersed. The SBA claims that small business face about 36% higher costs than large businesses. Previous studies have estimated that it costs small firms 60% more than large firms to comply with federal regulations.

Why do libertarians claim that governments tend to hurt the poor?

Libertarians believe governments actively harm in the poor by

• Imposing licensing schemes and heavy regulations on small business, which make it expensive and close to impossible for the urban poor to open their own businesses,

• Providing subsidies and monopoly privileges to the well-connected and rich, thus giving an even greater advantage on the market against small businesses and the poor,

•  Engaging in “smart growth” urban planning, which tends to drive up the prices of homes, apartments, services, and goods in the cities

It would take too much space to discuss each of the bullet points above at length. But here are some examples libertarians might give:

• An African-American woman might lift herself out of poverty by offering eyebrow threading or hair weave services. However, she faces zoning restrictions plus rules requiring her to attend expensive (and irrelevant) hairdressing classes and to acquire an expensive (an irrelevant) hairdressing license. And so, the laws prevent her from making her own way and thus leave her desperate and dependent.
• Another poor inner-city African-American might want to provide a service shuttling customers around his part of town, a great opportunity given that the taxis stay away. However, he will not be able to do so without obtaining a taxi license, and taxi licenses are often prohibitively expensive to acquire. The government limits the number of licenses, and in many cities, licenses cost more than $100K.
• Or, a group of poor Jewish immigrants might band together to create a tontine—a communal annuity and social insurance scheme in which all members pay in and receive death and old age benefits. However, private insurance companies have, in the past, lobbied the government to outlaw such practices, in order to force the poor to buy private insurance. (The result: the poor often end up stuck with government social insurance.)
• Or, a group of factory workers might band together to hire a doctor to provide health services a reduced cost to all members. In fact, this was common practice in the past. However, in the past, the American Medical Association faced competition from these “lodge doctors”, and then lobbied the government to induce a series of regulations that destroyed such practices.

These are all just examples–they are not enough to prove the point. However, it’s important to recognize what the claim is, here. The Left often mischaracterizes libertarians as saying that what we see out there in the real world is a result of free market politics, so it’s just too bad that some people end up so badly. But, in fact, libertarians say that what we see out there is frequently the result of government interventions caused by corporate rent seeking purposefully designed to disadvantage the poor on the market.