The Economics of Freedom: What Your Professors Won't Tell You, Selected Works of Frederic Bastiat
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at that price. In addition, the lack of free markets leads people to shift to black markets, under-the-table-bribes of officials, and other departures from the rule of law. The resulting mixture of shortage and corruption then typically induces yet greater tendencies toward authoritarian assertions of power. The effect of creating a “policy portfolio” that includes such proven bad policies is to undermine the economy, to create corruption, and even to undermine constitutional democracy.
Hybrid Ethical/Economic Criticisms
12. Markets Lead to More Inequality than Non-Market Processes
By definition, markets reward ability to satisfy consumer preferences and as abilities differ, so incomes will differ. Moreover, by definition, socialism is a state of equality, so every step toward socialism is a step toward equality.
If we want to understand the relationships between policies and outcomes, it should be kept in mind that property is a legal concept; wealth is an economic concept. The two are often confused, but they should be kept distinct. Market processes regularly redistribute wealth on a massive scale. In contrast, unwilling redistribution of property (when undertaken by individual citizens, it’s known as “theft”) is prohibited under the rules that govern free markets, which require that property be well defined and legally secure. Markets can redistribute wealth, even when property titles remain in the same hands. Every time the value of an asset (in which an owner has a property right) changes, the wealth of the asset owner changes. An asset that was worth 600 Euros yesterday may today be worth only 400 Euros. That’s a redistribution of 200 Euros of wealth through the market, although there has been no redistribution of property. So markets regularly redistribute wealth and in the process give owners of assets incentives to maximize their value or to shift their assets to those who will. That regular redistribution, based on incentives to maximize total value, represents transfers of wealth on a scale unthinkable for most politicians. In contrast, while market processes redistribute wealth, political processes redistribute property, by taking it from some and giving it to others; in the process, by making property less secure, such redistribution tends to make property in general less valuable, that is, to destroy wealth. The more unpredictable the redistribution, the greater the loss of wealth caused by the threat of redistribution of property.
Equality is a characteristic that can be realized along a number of different dimensions, but generally not across all. For example, people can all be equal before the law, but if that is the case, it is unlikely that they will have exactly equal influence over politics, for some who exercise their equal rights to freedom of speech will be more eloquent or energetic than others, and thus more influential. Similarly, equal rights to offer goods and services on free markets may not lead to exactly equal incomes, for some may work harder or longer (because they prefer income to leisure) than others, or have special skills for which others will pay extra. On the flip side, the attempt to achieve through coercion equality of influence or equality of incomes will entail that some exercise more authority or political power than others, that is, the power necessary to bring about such outcomes. In order to bring about a particular pattern of outcomes, someone or some group must have the “God’s Eye” view of outcomes necessary to redistribute, to see a lack here and a surplus there and thus to take from here and move to there. As powers to create equal outcomes are concentrated in the hands of those entrusted with them, as was the case in the officially egalitarian Soviet Union, those with unequal political and legal powers find themselves tempted to use those powers to attain unequal incomes or access to resources. Both logic and experience show that conscious attempts to attain equal or “fair” incomes, or some other pattern other than what the spontaneous order of the market generates, are generally self-defeating, for the simple reason that those who hold the power to redistribute property use it to benefit themselves, thus converting inequality of political power into other sorts of inequality, whether honors, wealth, or something else. Such was certainly the experience of the officially communist nations and such is the path currently being taken by other nations, such as Venezuela, in which total power is being accumulated in the hands of one man, Hugo Chavez, who demands such massively unequal power, ostensibly in order to create equality of wealth among citizens.
According to the data in the 2006 Economic Freedom of the World Report, reliance on free markets is weakly correlated to income inequality (from the least free to the most free economies the world over, divided into quartiles, the percentage of income received by the poorest ten percent varies from an average of 2.2 percent to an average of 2.5 percent), but it is very strongly correlated to the levels of income of the poorest ten percent (from the least free to the most free economies the world over, divided into quartiles, the average levels of income received by the poorest ten percent are $826, $1,186, $2,322, and $6,519). Greater reliance on markets seems to have little impact on income distributions, but it does substantially raise the incomes of the poor and it is likely that many of the poor would certainly consider that a good thing.
13. Markets Cannot Meet Human Needs, Such as Health, Housing, Education, and
Food
Goods should be distributed according to principles appropriate to their nature. Markets distribute goods according to ability to pay, but health, housing, education, food, and other basic human needs, precisely because they are needs, should be distributed according to need, not ability to pay.
If markets do a better job of meeting human needs than other principles, that is, if more people enjoy higher standards of living under markets than under socialism, it seems that the allocation mechanism under markets does a better job of meeting the criterion of need, as well. As noted above, the incomes of the poorest tend to rise rapidly with the degree of market freedom, meaning that the poor have more resources with which to satisfy their needs. (Naturally, not all needs are directly related to income; true friendship and love certainly are not. But there is no reason to think that those are more “equitably” distributed by coercive mechanisms, either, or even that they can be distributed by such mechanisms.)
Moreover, while assertions of “need” tend to be rather rubbery claims, as are assertions of “ability,” willingness to pay is easier to measure. When people bid with their own money for goods and services, they are telling us how much they value those goods and services relative to other goods and services. Food, certainly a more basic need than education or health care, is provided quite effectively through markets. In fact, in those countries where private property was abolished and state allocation substituted for market allocation, the results were famine and even cannibalism. Markets meet human needs for most goods, including those that respond to basic human needs, better than do other mechanisms.
Satisfaction of needs requires the use of scarce resources, meaning that choices have to be made about their allocation. Where markets are not allowed to operate, other systems and criteria for rationing scarce resources are used, such as bureaucratic allocation, political pull, membership in a ruling party, relationship to the president or the main holders of power, or bribery and other forms of corruption. It is hardly obvious that such criteria are better than the criteria evolved by markets, nor that they generate more equality; the experience is rather the opposite.
14. Markets Rest on the Principle of the Survival of the Fittest
Just like the law of the jungle, red in tooth and claw, the law of the market means survival of the fittest. Those who cannot produce to market standards fall by the wayside and are trampled underfoot.
Invocations of evolutionary principles such as “survival of the fittest” in the study of living systems and in the study of human social interaction lead to confusion unless they identify what it is in each case that survives. In the case of biology, it is the individual animal and its ability to reproduce itself. A rabbit that is eaten by a cat because it’s too slow to escape isn’t going to have any more offspring. The fastest rabbits will be the ones
to reproduce. When applied to social evolution, however, the unit of survival is quite different; it’s not the individual human being, but the form of social interaction, such as a custom, an institution, or a firm, that is “selected” in the evolutionary struggle. When a business firm goes out of business, it “dies”, that is to say, that particular form of social cooperation “dies”, but that certainly doesn’t mean that the human beings who made up the firm—as investors, owners, managers, employees, and so on—die, as well. A less efficient form of cooperation is replaced by a more efficient form. Market competition is decidedly unlike the competition of the jungle. In the jungle animals compete to eat each other, or to displace each other. In the market, entrepreneurs and firms compete with each other for the right to cooperate with consumers and with other entrepreneurs and firms. Market competition is not competition for the opportunity to live; it is competition for the opportunity to cooperate.
15. Markets Debase Culture and Art
Art and culture are responses to the higher