>The problem is this adorable libertarian dedication to freedom and voluntary interactions naturally ends the second any employer or commercial neighbor says it ends. Such an arrangement produces freedom for the boardroom and nobody else.

First, your little "adorable" quip:

It's so adorable that I don't want people's human rights to be violated, and them to be imprisoned for engaging in a voluntary interaction with another consenting adult, or refusing to hand over a share of the currency they received in private trade!

So adorable that you've justified brute authoritarian infringements of other people's human rights!

Second the substance of your counterargument:

Nothing "ends" when the employer wants to end the relationship. A voluntary relationship means either party is free at any time to end that relationship. A free society doesn't mean you get whatever you want, even a relationship with someone who doesn't want to be in one with you.

The problem is emotionally fragile mental children can't accept this fact, and consequently appeal to government for authoritarian mandates to violate others human rights and force them to give into their illegitimate demands.

>And on the basis of influence over public policy, your argument is that these think tanks you name are somehow responsible for the really existing world under late capitalism: its skyrocketing levels of privatization, plummeting protections for workers, employees and neighbors, all-time lows in union membership, increasing latitude for business interests, monumental struggles to merely obtain wages that match the heightened productivity of modern workers, etc.

What "late stage capitalism"?

Social welfare spending has massively increased over the last 40 years. The last 40 years have seen the largest experiment in social democracy in human history.

Here are the raw statistics for all of the edgy teenagers who think we're in "late stage capitalism":

https://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/what-is...

Annual inflation-adjusted spending growth on various components of social welfare spending (1972 - 2011):

>Pensions and retirement: 4.4%

>Healthcare: 5.7%

>Welfare: 4.1%

Annual inflation-adjusted economic growth over the time frame:

>2.7%

By every broad-based objective measure, the scale of forcible income redistribution has massively increased in relative and absolute terms.
The only thing the US has to show for it is slower productivity growth, lower wage growth, huge trade deficits, and I would argue, an explosion in single parenthood:

http://pinetreewatchdog.org/500-rise-in-single-parenthood-fu...

But thanks to the mass delusion that afflicts people like you, the popular wisdom says that we've increasingly adopted capitalism, and this is the source of all economic maladies, and that the solution is the ever elusive social democracy that we've allegedly been starved of.

>plummeting protections for workers, employees and neighbors, all-time lows in union membership, increasing latitude for business interests, monumental struggles to merely obtain wages that match the heightened productivity of modern workers, etc.

Again with the socialist double speak about authoritarian prohibitions that limit contracting rights being "protections".

There has been no reduction in the scope of laws that restrict the right of workers and employers to freely enter into contracts.

Unions succeeded in getting the public on their side, and the result was a vast number of new laws being passed that restrict the right of the majority of workers and employers, for the benefit of the lucky few in unions.

Unions still exist, but thanks to the laws they passed, and their exorbitant demands, they bankrupted or severely damaged all of the American manufacturers who didn't outsource to countries that still have a free market in employment (e.g. countries where an employer is allowed to fire workers who unionize or strike, and workers need to actually compete and perform to get and maintain a job), so you don't have many large private sector unions anymore, but unions in the government-sector are larger than ever, and sucking from the public teat like there's no tomorrow.

As for the supposed decoupling between wages and productivity, this is not true, and claims to the contrary are an artefact of misleading statistics. The following article explains both the problem with the statistics, and the source of the real problem, which is growing income disparity (hint: it has nothing to do with an over abundance of liberty):

https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-t...