TITLE TITLE IN FAVOR OF FREE MARKETS
Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. ... if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. – FTC , Chapter 1 on accidents of personality. – C&F , Chapter 3 The achievement of allocation of resourceswithout compulsion is themajor instrumental role in themarket place... – C&F , Chapter 10 ... voluntary exchange is a necessary condition for both prosperity and freedom. – FTC , Chapter 1 If what people get is to be determined by “fairness,” who is to decide what is “fair”?... Clearly only force or the threat of force will do... And even terror has not equalized outcomes. In every case [of totalitarian politics], wide inequality persists by any criterion; inequality between the rulers and the ruled, not only in power, but also in material standards of life. – FTC , Chapter 5 Few of us believe in a moral code that justifies forcing people to give up much of what they produce to finance payments to persons they do not know
for purposes they may not approve of. – FTC , Chapter 5 A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcomes – ahead of freedomwill end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who will use it to promote their own interests. – FTC , Chapter 5 That should set the youngster thinking... Those brief verses certainly contained free market lessons for me, especially the quotes from Capitalism and Freedom . They’ve stuck in my mind for more than a quarter of a century. And while paging through my dog- eared paperback, I realized why... They’d come with a strong dose of lessons-to- the-contrary. I’d forgotten when and where I’d read the book, but on the end pages, I discovered an ink sketch (below) I’d made of Ernest Hemingway’s one-time home, Finca Vigía, in the impoverished village of San Francisco de Paula. While Milton Friedman was teaching the virtues of a free market, I was seeing the vices of a centrally controlled economy. I’d brought Capitalism and Freedom along to read on a 1995 assignment to Cuba.
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