And I have heard it argued, by the very likes of Ron Paul, that there should be no laws protecting workers from abuses, sexual or otherwise, from employers, as employees are "free to work where ever they wish" and the "marketplace" will regulate behavior. While you're counting all of the people you know that are "free to work where ever they wish," I'll only offer up all of history in refutation of this fallacy.
Funny you should mention that subject area. I recently started reading the Case for Discrimination by Walter Block. He discusses the differences between what discrimination is and the myth of how it adversely affects society. There was a time when being discriminating was a good thing, but those reasons have become convoluted through media and misinformation. Discrimination is simply making a choice of one thing over another. Central planners in the name of resolving the conflict of racism show us the law of unintended consequences in action; racism is not allowed to fade into history, with many proponents continueing to hold on to it as a method of market gain.
I recall a wonderful quote from an interview with Morgan Freeman on racism and black history month; "You're going to relegate my history to a month? I don't want a black history month. Black history is American history." The idea that minority causes are more utilitarian than majority causes is just as baseless as the inverse. Let the market decide and negative discrimination will fade into the background, holding little value or potential. Affirmative action has been proven a failure born from good intentions. In itself, it promots discrimination, for the utility of some underprivileged class, of course, but at the expense of others.
I still find it almost humorous how so many believe that those in the Austrian school promote racism and negative discrimination through free market principles. Anyone who actually takes the time to read any significant works by Mises, Rothbard, Paul, or countless others would come to understand that those misnomers are simply invalid.
I have also tried to read Krugman, but there is more subjective position to the Chicago school, which casts aside many hard economic principles. His work is more fiction than science, which is why his work grossly undersells that of giants in the field like Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, Hoppe, and many others who have since left us to learn from their work. Krugman simply discounts fact for opinion, working toward something quite un-utilitarian. Bastiat warned of allowing the state to hold a monopoly on the use of force through fiat law.
Nationalism is the statist course Moscow followed on their path to inflation, reduced individual rights, and finally economic collapse, though we seem to be following a similar path despite the historical aversion toward anything Red. We have been warned over and over about fiat money, it's corruption, it's lack of market value. No matter how much the Fed prints, more paper can not create growth or social utility, but it has done immense harm through the boom and bust cycle that the money changers promote as being the key to economic success. All of history is indeed offered up to refute the fallacy of interventionism.
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