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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The court ruled that “closely held corporations” whose owners have religious convictions against contraceptives cannot be forced to pay for employee coverage for those products.

I wish the court could have said this instead: (1) No one has a natural right to force other people to pay for her (or his) contraception or anything else (with or without the government’s help), and by logical extension, (2) everyone has a right to refuse to pay if asked.

For people about to celebrate the Fourth of July, these principles ought to be, well, self-evident.

A group of politicians cannot legitimately have the power to compel one group of people—employers, taxpayers, or insurers—to pay for things that another group wants. That’s immoral, and it violates inalienable rights. Moreover, when government has the power to issue such commands—always backed by force, let us never forget—it sets off a mad interest-group scramble for control of the government machinery—because control is a license to steal. Is it any wonder that people are willing to spend billions of dollars to influence who makes government policy? If people face the alternative of controlling the government or being controlled by it, those who have resources will buy power and influence, even if only in self-defense.

Supporters of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) say the court decision permits the favored employers to make health-care decisions for women. No it doesn’t. It only prohibits, unfortunately in only a narrow set of cases, women from being able to use government to force their employers to pay for those decisions. When did we start equating the right to buy contraceptives—which hardly anyone disputes—with the power to compel others to pay? It is demagogic to insist that prohibiting the latter violates the former.

Equally ridiculous is the claim that if employers choose not to pay for their employees’ birth control, employers are forcing their religious beliefs on employees. If that were true, it would also have to be true that a non-Christian’s refusal to pay for a Christian’s transportation to church on Sundays would be equivalent to forcing the non-Christian’s religious beliefs on the Christian. That’s ridiculous.

But, say the ACA’s supporters, contraception is important to women’s health care and can be expensive. Let’s grant both points. So what? How can that justify forcing employers to pay? That is the question. By what right does someone resort to the aggressive power of government to obtain something he or she cannot or does not want to pay for? (It is not only low-income women who qualify for free contraceptives.)

The end doesn’t justify the means.

Another objection to the ruling is that religious freedom doesn’t apply to family-owned corporations (or any corporations). Corporations are not people, the critics say.

True, corporations are not people. They are groups—of people. It’s not clear why individuals who run companies don’t have the same rights as other people.

In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg worries that the ruling puts the country on a slippery slope: If religious employers can opt out of paying for contraception coverage, why not other things, such as blood transfusions and vaccinations?

Why not, indeed? This surely is a slippery slope. But here’s the thing: some slippery slopes are good. This is a good one.

This controversy would not exist if government didn’t privilege employer-based insurance or mandate “free” services, which  are not really free because the expense is made up by reducing future wage increases. Indeed, this controversy would not exist were it not for licensing, patents, regulatory insurance and medical cartels, and other features of the corporate state.

Free persons ought to be at liberty to opt out of any decree that violates their rights. (Decrees against murder, theft, and rape do not violate rights, so one may not opt out of them.) This libertarian principle means that a person would not only be free to opt out of a contraception mandate on religious grounds but would also be able to opt out of any mandate on any grounds—moral as well as religious—or no grounds at all! That’s freedom.

Think of the benefits: you and I could opt out of paying for war and empire. This is a slippery slope all freedom-loving people should embrace.

Conservatives claim it as a victory for religious freedom, while progressives denounce it as a blow against the rights of women. However, the framing here is awkward. The intersection of a cultural schism and relations between labor and capital raises a question: How did the status quo, where employers have insurance to think about and workers are expected to be on the lookout for their bosses personal beliefs, come to be in the first place?

Commonly forgotten in American history, as they conflict with the popular myth about modern capitalism somehow being a “free market” whether one thinks that good or ill, are the past more explicit interventions of the U.S. government. Of particular note is the National War Labor Relations Board, which during World War 2 placed wage controls on industrial workers. In the crackpot reasoning of the government appointed experts at the time, this was to prevent inflation. With government spending in overdrive due to the total war economy, plowing endless resources into production of military goods for the state, employers started to use health insurance as a perk, which the NWLRB ruled didn’t violate the controls.

After war footing shifted from WW2 to the Cold War, the IRS ruled that health insurance premiums employers paid were exempt from taxation. Having violently marginalized more radical labor organizations, setting a Devil’s Bargain of sorts between existing unions, large-scale business, and the government, the expectation was set. You worked for a big company and depended on them for health coverage, the corporations got extensive backing in the form of subsidies from the government, and the government got everyone’s tax dollars to pour into empire. Yes, your health coverage is an accident of decades of corporate state collusion, a diversion of what could have been income to do what you wanted to with into a tool of control.

Think about what could have been if the government had never done any of this. With labor power at full, no government butting in to deny your agency or concentrate the market, and no policy for your boss to micromanage, workers could simply take the dissolved surplus capital and handle the matter themselves. Perhaps labor unions could adapt, form their own insurance pools, and liberate women in the workforce from ever again having to care what anyone else thinks about them getting birth control. Despite professed views in the cramped political mainstream, interest on their part in such is scarce, as the fire on such issues is what lines their pockets and keeps people going to the polls.

With thought, the “culture war” reveals itself as a prison fight — forced by the guards.

SCOTUS has been dancing its way down a “whatever it takes to keep things from collapsing under the weight of their own contradictions” tightrope with ACA.

First they affirmed its dubious constitutionality, now they’re carving out exceptions for entities which claim to be acting on orders of a boss in the sky.

They seem to have taken both decisions less on the merits than on a sort of assumption that the earth will explode if they don’t find a way to just keep things moving along in the direction they’re going.

For that matter, ACA itself is a strange hybrid — part primary intervention (massive corporate welfare), part secondary intervention (“affordable healthcare for all”) which seems to be failing as both and which the wheels are probably going to come completely off of sooner or later no matter what SCOTUS does.

I have trouble imagining ACA or anything that might happen with it as the specific spark of revolution, but I can definitely see people someday looking back on it in the same way that we now look back on Russians queuing up in line in front of state stores to get toilet paper or shoes.

All the contending narratives about the Hobby Lobby case seem to involve personal agency. That’s definitely true on the mainstream libertarian side, which presents this as a straightforward question of whether Hobby Lobby’s owners (the Green family, which hold it as a close corporation) can be forced by the state to provide employee benefits that conflict with their personal religious beliefs. But there are a lot more people’s agency at stake here than the Green family’s. And frankly, the Green family billionaires are pretty low on my list of “underdogs” whose moral agency my heart bleeds for (especially considering they invest in contraceptive manufacturers, and most of the “Christian” knick-knacks they sell are produced by near-slave labor in Chinese sweatshops).

And just as an aside on the issue of the Green family’s religious beliefs, the original purpose of the limited liability corporation was to create a boundary between the fictional person of the corporation (even a close corporation held entirely by one family of billionaires) and the natural persons of the shareholders. If this wall is being breached for the sake of identifying the Hobby Lobby corporation with the personal religious beliefs of its shareholders, then maybe we should reconsider allowing the same wall of separation to protect individuals against liability for bad things the corporation does, like BP and the Deep Horizons oil spill.

There’s really no way this decision could have come out that I’d have been happy with. As a libertarian, I do believe in the principle of free association, and I don’t want a government that can mandate particular forms of health insurance for anybody. I don’t think I would have been happy if this decision had gone the other way, just because of what it would have implied for the growing corporate-state nexus. But I wouldn’t have had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach about it like I do now.

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.

As Roderick Long argued (“How Inequality Shapes Our Lives,” Center for a Stateless Society, January 9, 2013), we experience our so-called right to freely contract as equal parties, in most cases, as situations in which one “party” has all the bargaining power and presents the other “party” with a take-it-or-leave-it deal pre-written in standard boilerplate by that “party’s” lawyers.

Now, if you rent your home, take a look at your lease. Did you write it? Of course not. Did you and your landlord write it together? Again, of course not. It was written by your landlord (or by your landlord’s lawyer), and is filled with far more stipulations of your obligations to her than of her obligations to you. It may even contain such ominously sweeping language as “lessee agrees to abide by all such additional instructions and regulations as the lessor may from time to time provide” (which, if taken literally, would be not far shy of a slavery contract). If you’re late in paying your rent, can the landlord assess a punitive fee? You betcha. By contrast, if she’s late in fixing the toilet, can you withhold a portion of the rent? Just try it.

Now think about your relationship with your employer. In theory, you and she are free and equal individuals entering into a contract for mutual benefit. In practice, she most likely orders the hours and minutes of your day in exacting detail …. [T]he contract is provided by her and is designed to benefit her. She also undertakes to interpret it; and you will find yourself subjected to loads of regulations and directives that you never consented to. And if you try inventing new obligations for her as she does for you, I predict you will be, shall we say, disappointed.

These aren’t merely cases of some people having more stuff than you do. They’re cases in which some people are systematically empowered to dictate the terms on which other people live, work, and trade.

In the case of the wage relationship, we live in an economy where the state has systematically shifted bargaining power to the employers of labor and owners of capital, at the expense of those selling their labor power. The state enforces artificial property rights that make land and capital artificially expensive and scarce for workers, and thereby turns the labor market into a buyer’s market where workers compete for jobs rather than the reverse. Through licensing, zoning and housing codes, the state criminalizes low-capital, low-overhead self-employment and comfortable subsistence (like self-built, vernacular and unconventional housing) — thereby forcing workers into dependence on the wage relationship in exactly the way Enclosure did in England.

In the case of healthcare, the underlying legal regime that made the Hobby Lobby case possible was a vast, interlocking constellation of power that included the regulatory state, insurance corporations, the professional licensing cartels (including the requirement that some medications be prescribed only by licensed physicians), the patent-based pharmaceutical cartel, and utterly corrupt bureaucratic corporate hospital chains.

Obamacare itself merely touches the finance side of healthcare — basically guaranteeing revenues and profits to the existing institutional healthcare delivery monopolies through a combination of mandates and subsidies — while leaving the institutional economic power and price markups on the delivery side untouched. It cements the control of these interlocking, bureaucratic, authoritarian — and in many cases evil — institutions over our lives, and legally compels us to consume their services on whatever terms they see fit to offer. But it uses tax money to help us feed the corporate coffers if we can’t afford to pay for the monopoly services on our own.

Absent all these restrictions, open-source manufacturers could produce currently patented drugs at about 5% of the price, consumer co-ops could pool their purchasing power to buy medicine in bulk the way they now do with food, and anyone could just walk in and buy contraceptives (much cheaper) without a note from their doctor.

If all these forms of monopoly and privilege were abolished, no one would be dependent on corporate employers for opportunities to engage in productive labor and transform their skills and effort into access to the necessities of life. And no one would depend on an unholy alliance of the state, insurance corporations, drug companies and professional licensing cartels for contraception or any other form of healthcare.

In the end, it all boils down to agency. So long as there are institutions, government or corporate, which exert unaccountable power over us for their own ends, no outcome will be satisfactory — because we weren’t involved in the decision. So whatever stopgaps people resort to in the short run, including using the state as a weapon against some abuses of corporate power, I’m not going to criticize them on a doctrinaire basis.

But we’re never going to get Hobby Lobby, and big corporations and wage employers in general, out of control of our lives by using the state as a weapon. They usually work together, and always will. Ultimately, the only way out is what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call “exodus” — building our own horizontal institutions outside of both corporation and state, and abandoning the corporate-state nexus to rot.

Nevertheless, as a free market anarchist opposed in principle to aggressive interference with nonviolent, personal decisions, I can’t find a justification for the state to force an employer to foot the bill for contraception (or for anything at all). It matters not what the text of the Affordable Care Act dictates, nor what constitutional precedent seems to demand of that Act. Using the arbitrary force of a government edict to prescribe the terms of agreements between individuals is never legitimate or conscionable.

Arguably, however, state intervention has both limited access to contraception and consolidated market power in fewer hands, precluding opportunities for self-employment and driving people into a coerced dependence on large corporations — whether “closely held” or not. Perhaps, given such economic conditions, we as anarchists ought to see mandates such as the one at issue in Hobby Lobby as a move in the right direction, correcting an injustice created by conditions of corporate dominance in the American economy. But to the extent that this is how we contemplate such mandates, we are forced to grapple with the question of where to draw the line, determining just when we find it permissible to sanction government coercion in this way. And this, it turns out, is not such an easy question.

Unless as libertarians we continue to default to opposition in the face of new coercive mandates, regulations, and other controls, we find ourselves adrift in the muddle of balancing calculations for which we are constantly arraigning statist planners, attempting the impossible task of creating a more free society through statutory reforms and legal adjustments. Our focus must always be on opposing economic intervention, not concocting clever apologias for the kinds of interventions we feel might be less repellent or even potentially advantageous to the victims of primary interventions.

For someone with liberal, tolerant social values, defending Hobby Lobby is an odious and unpalatable position. Anything approximating the society that libertarians envision would find mere employees transformed into truly free individuals, autonomous sovereigns who could tell companies like Hobby Lobby to take a hike, who wouldn’t have to grovel for the scraps that large corporations toss their way. As Voltairine de Cleyre wrote, in a freed market, “exchange would take place freely, commodities would circulate, business of all kinds would be stimulated, and, the government privilege being taken away from inventions, industries would spring up at every turn, bosses would be hunting men rather than men bosses .  . . .” The products and services associated with healthcare would cease to be the crushingly expensive source of destitution and distress they are today.

From a market anarchist perspective, there could not have been a good or ideal result in Hobby Lobby. The factual picture on display in the case simply could not materialize in a free society, one where an economy of voluntary exchange without special government privilege truly flourished. It is left to us to imagine a more just and free world, to find a way to replace the pernicious corporate-government nexus with a genuine libertarian society.