The problem is that none of the systems you listed failed because of free markets - they failed because of market manipulation. For example:
Manufacturing:
"The plant's closing was announced after union workers declined to open contract negotiations about three years early." This is in my home town, where people dropped out of high school to go work there for $20+/hour. The unions declared it a victory for labor. It's one of many Muncie factories which have closed - enough to warrant an
online photo album. The unions blocked any negotiations, and the law disallowed the plants from hiring outside the union. That put all the power in the union's hands, and they used it to squish their own members. That's not a "free market" by any stretch of the imagination.
But did plant relocate to another country to to another location in the United States?
I don't know anyone that has lost a job to a visa holder.
Anecdotal stories abound if you go looking for them. There are stories about people who have had to train their replacements, etc.
Visas are a barrier to entry and very expensive for an employer to support. Thus, companies only hire them if there is no one else already around who can do the job for the asking price.
The key word is "asking price". If the asking price is really low then it might be difficult to find people depending on the job.
We run ads all the time to find PhD chemists, but not a single American will even respond because the government-mandated post-doc salary (set by NIH and NSF) is far lower than they can make in industry. So, we've instead hired one Indian and three Chinese post-docs.
Are you in industry or academia? What you say doesn't make much sense unless the compensation you're offering is lower than the government minimum. Why would Americans want to spend 9-10 years in college (undergrad + PhD studies) often working 60 hours/week in the lab for $40,000/year anyway?
Again, the barrier is wage manipulation by the government, forcing wages down in this case. Ironically, the NIH-mandated post-doc salary is right around $40k/year, which is actually less than the unskilled factory workers in Muncie were making before the plants closed.
Do you really think universities and professors are going to want to spend more than $40,000/year on a postdoc? From their own grants? If that $40k/year minimum is true, it probably represents a wage increase for postdocs.
Low-skilled workers cannot be displaced by immigration, since immigration simply introduces competition.
That's ludicrous. What if the competition is willing to do the work for less money or willing to provide more labor output per unit of compensation?
What if the competition is willing to work off-the-books for cash?
Even if the immigrants received the same wages and provided the same amount of labor output per unit of compensation (same value to an employer) they could still displace domestic workers.
The prevailing wage might go down, as people are willing to do the same work for less. The problem arises because it is illegal for American citizens to compete since they are subject to minimum wage laws which require law-abiding employers to pay more than the prevailing wage.
And if they worked for those lower wages we would have new problems such as impoverished working poor people needing food stamps, welfare, and Medicaid.
I don't see how competition to be in a race to the bottom is good for workers.
This is a very complex topic that I could probably write a book about, but suffice it to say that the problem is that the law-abiding citizens and companies are penalized because they can't compete with the law breakers such that the law has again become a barrier to the workings of a free market.
Perhaps the problem is the government's failure to reign in the criminals? Maybe the government enabled all of this by allowing mass immigration and illegal immigration?
Healthcare is similarly complicated. The mixed system we have now is the root of the problem, and it needs to go one way or the other. I'll avoid arguing which way in this thread because there are plenty of other threads on that already.
The problem is that under the way you suggest, millions of people would end up dying due to lack of health care.
The bottom line is that the perceived "problems" with the free market are almost always traceable to the regulations which inhibit the market from working as it would in the absence of those regulations. I'm not saying that a free market will work in all cases, but prohibiting the market from equilibrating in response to market forces (e.g. mass immigration) creates huge problems.
Oh, I fully understand. Remember, I used to be an advocate of laissez-faire myself and engaged in these types of debates all time. If I wanted to play devil's advocate I could convincingly argue what you're arguing; I've made arguments in favor of the free market and argued that government regulations are the real cause of the problems before. However, I now wholeheartedly disagree that the free market will solve these problems satisfactorily and not create other problems.
The solution to American workers losing their jobs to foreigners is not for Americans to accept poverty wages or to remove all environmental and labor regulations. That would just make us even poorer.
I hope you'll question the free market dogma that unregulated markets will magically solve all of our problems. The market works good for some things and bad for others (international trade, health care, general education, land-dependent infrastructure, environmental externalities).
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