The obvious failings of our court system have encouraged some free market theorists to support binding arbitration a more efficient alternative. In doing so many of the greates failings of classical liberal thought come to a head: its lack of awareness that public values exist, its lack of a real theory of power, its equating justice with efficiency, and its subordination of genuine human beings to theoretical abstractions on which they are impaled.
Jamie Leigh Jones’ unbelieveable ordeal along with the depravity it exposes at all levels of our government and its corporate cronies, should give many classical liberals long pause. For some of her video testimony, see here. In case anyone does not yet know, she was drugged and gang raped in Baghdad by American employees of Halliburton’s subsidiary, KBR. The company locked her into a cubicle, without food or water, after she reported it. She was finally freed after a sympathetic guard loaned her a cell p[hone with which she called her father in Texas, who alerted the State Department, which then freed her. She needed an operation to help repair the physical injuries she suffered in the assault, but KBR then ‘lost’ the medical evidence of her rape, making conviction impossible. The State Department did nothing other than freeing her.
KBR argues she has no legal standing because she signed a binding arbitration agreement when she accepted employment.
Jones testified to Congress:

When people work for “private contractors” they apparently give up all their legal rights. Raped, beaten, severely injured, imprisoned – and because she signed a binding arbitration agreement with corporate goons, she likely has no recourse with a government that never met a corporation it didn’t want to help, or a citizen it didn’t want to screw. When she went to a company supplied psychiatrist, the first question she was asked was whether she planned to sue.
Evidence of the absolute moral depravity of the American right wing in all its guises? Yes. But she also would have no recourse in many versions of a pure “libertarian” or classical liberal society, either.
Jones’ ordeal exposes the theoretical emptiness of most contemporary free market thought. It needs a theory of power able to confront concrete realities and not just the abstract equality of contracts considered without attention to context. The concept of arbitration among genuine equals has great merit. When applied to formal equals who in reality are anything but equal. It leads to atrocities such as what happened to Jamie Leigh Jones.