The Wisdom of the Free Market

“So long as effective freedom of exchange is maintained, the central feature of the market organization of economic activity is that it prevents one person from interfering with another in respect of most of his activities.  The consumer is protected from coercion by the seller because of the presence of other sellers with whom he can deal.  The seller is protected from coercion by the consumer because of other consumers to whom he can sell.  The employee is protected from coercion by the employer because of other employees for whom he can work, and so on.  And the market does this impersonally and without centralized authority.

Indeed a major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it does this task so well.  It gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want.  Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

-Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.