Hobby Lobby — A Question of Agency on Feed 44

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Hobby Lobby — A Question of Agency” read James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

To repeat, there were a lot of people whose agency was at stake here besides the Green family’s — in particular, the 70% majority of Hobby Lobby’s workers who are women. who may have been having a hard time finding work and accepted employment at Hobby Lobby because they really needed a job, who were glad to get health coverage — and who may someday desperately need “morning after” contraception. I felt sick about these people in a way after Monday’s ruling that I never would have about the Green family.

And questions of free association aside, an economic system in which a small wealthy family can wind up in the one-sided position of exercising their own agency at the expense of 13,000 others is a system that’s broken, sick and rotten.

The system we live in, in legal theory, is based on freedom of contract, and the idea that tenants and landlords, software users and sellers, and workers and employers are equal parties to a contract. But we all know that’s nonsense. We feel it in our bones.

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