Mises himself admitted the market submits individuals to harsh, freedom-limiting pressure

Evidence

Writing about wages in an unregulated market, Mises contended that such fluctuations ‘penalize disobedience’ and ‘recompense obedience’ to the demands of the labour market. As this penal language makes clear enough, the market subject is not free in any expansive sense. The demands of the sovereign market, Mises states explicitly, ‘submit the individual to a harsh social pressure’ and ‘indirectly limit the individual’s freedom to choose his occupation’. But he suggests that this pressure leaves the individual ‘a margin in the limits of which he can choose between what suits him better and what less’. It is only within this predetermined margin that the neoliberal individual is ‘free to choose’. She may leave her home to pursue work in another city or stay at home and drive for Uber. She may not join a trade union, let alone struggle against the capitalist exploitation of waged labour. For Mises, ‘this amount of freedom is the maximum of freedom that an individual can enjoy in the framework of the social division of labor’. By pathologising mass politics as a threat to individual freedom, neoliberal liberty rights seek to confine human action within what I call the ‘margin of freedom’ offered by a liberal capitalist order. The neoliberal right to liberty is the right to do anything that does not harm the market. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 48

Categorization

• QUESTION: The neoliberal ‘margin of freedom’ framing is worth pressing against later — does Whyte’s deployment of the gig-economy example (‘drive for Uber’) map squarely onto Mises’s mid-century text?
• SEED: The ‘right to do anything that does not harm the market’ inversion of Marx is a sharp essay angle on how freedom-language gets redefined by power.
• CANDY: The single line ‘The neoliberal right to liberty is the right to do anything that does not harm the market’ is a memorable elevator-version of the book’s core move.