Essential Freed Market Reading
In a couple of brief posts Charles Johnson and Sheldon Richman say a lot.
It’s convenient to talk about “market forces,” but you need to remember that remember that those “market forces” are not supernatural entities that act on people from the outside. “Market forces” are a conveniently abstracted way of talking about the systematic patterns that emerge from people’s economic choices. So if the question is, who will stop markets from running riot, the answer is: We will; by peacefully choosing what to buy and what not to buy, where to work and where not to work, what to accept and what not to accept, we inevitably shape and order the market that surrounds us. When we argue about whether or not government should intervene in the economy in order to regiment markets, the question is not whether markets should be made orderly and regular, but rather whether the process of ordering is in the hands of the people making the trade, or by unaccountable third parties; and whether the means of ordering are going to be consensual or coercive.
