Comrade Frase offered his thoughts on the Hostess collapse the other day, and while I have my differences with his take, that’s not what I want to talk about here. What fascinates me about the  the bakery workers’ strike are all the reactions to it, and what they reveal about the worldview underlying our free market in labor.

On Twitter a while ago, some neoliberal creep who works for Bloomberg News lamented that New York’s transit system would be so much better off if the workers’ pay levels weren’t so “uncompetitive.” Meanwhile, every time a Wal-Mart flak goes on TV to talk about the company’s labor problems, they’re always at pains to insist that their stores pay “competitive wages.” So goes the rhetoric of market competition: for Wal-Mart, competitiveness means wages that are high enough; for the MTA it  means wages that aren’t low enough.

Somewhere out there, there must be some wage level that’s just right — that the wisdom of the market deems really and truly competitive. But how would we know a competitive wage if we saw one?