the free market, not because I knew anything about markets, but because I live in a free (or nearly free) country, and I’m a free man (as long as I call home frequently), and it works for me. I was skeptical about the ability of politics to deliver economic benefits because I did know something about that. I’d been writing about politics, at home and abroad, for years. I had a low opinion of the trade and its practitioners. And I considered culture, as an economic factor, to be a joke. How is ballet going to make the Tanzanians wealthy? I was stupidly surprised to find out how important law is. Law, of course, derives from politics. And a political system is ultimately a product of a society’s attitudes, ideas, and beliefs—that damned conundrum, its culture. Which brings me back to the free market. I started out looking at the free market in terms of its effectiveness, its “efficiency,” as an economist would say. I ended up looking at the free market as a moral device. My initial prejudice was right in one respect. The most-important part of the free market is the part that’s free. Economic liberty cannot be untangled from liberty of other kinds. You may have freedom of religion, if the rabbi can get off night shifts on Fridays. You may have freedom of assembly, but where are you all going to go if it rains? The U.S. Constitution is (at least I hope it is) a statement of American cultural values. The First Amendment implies a free market. Six of the remaining nine articles in the Bill of Rights defend private property specifically. And two of the others concern rights reserved to the people, some of which are certainly economic rights. We are a free-market nation, though the electors and the elected sometimes forget it. A belief in the free market means a belief that people have an innate right to the fruits of their endeavors, and the right to dispose of the fruit the way they see fit, as long as other people don’t get pasted in the face with a rotten peach or something. There are people who don’t believe this. Some of these people are just bad. They steal. Some of these people are “nationalistic” and think it’s okay to take things from other people if they live more than a peach toss away or speak another language or have a different religion or look funny. And the kings, emperors, and so forth who ruled mankind during most of history were under the impression that everything belongs to kings, emperors, and so forth. Now that the kings and emperors have been shot or reduced to pathetic ceremonial posts, the most common reason given for not believing in economic liberty is that the free market is unfair. Socialists, Social Democrats, American
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