A market economy is not a product of free economic behavior but rather, of
an order requiring the fulfillment of systemic tasks by market operators.
Their performance needs to be guided by rules imposing competition as a
political tool to functionalize their action, in such a way that market
failures can be avoided. This is not only the case for coordinated market
economies, typically making use of direct market regulations, but also for
liberal market economies, even if these latter ones prefer an indirect
regulation of economic life, by having to condition individual behavior.
Different modes of regulation may be used to stabilize the same accumulation
regime, which is understood as patterns of production and consumption
reproducible over a long period. In other words, liberal market ideology, as
well as liberalism, is anything but a theory on unlimited freedom: it “needs
freedom”, but also needs to “consume” this freedom as a condition of
historical and social possibilities for a free market economy. Even if
differences may involve the way of assuring those possibilities, the
necessity to force economic behavior into functionalizing schemes must be
seen as unavoidable.
Law-and-Economics Approaches to Labour and Employment Law
