Thursday, April 7, 2011

Exceptional Wealth and Free Markets

I found this comment at a free market blog:

 "When markets first become more free that will unjustly impoverish some and enrich others. "

How can ending subsidies and regulations (that which unfrees the market) and allowing people to trade freely, unjustly impoverish some?  Or enrich others?

1. That for some promised pensions and assured circumstances become null and void?  If they did not consider the offer, and see its unsustainability at inception, they only experience condign punishment.  That they did not discern that a violence-grounded transfer of wealth to them was unethical is not worthy of our concern.

2. Once their circumstances change, it changes in a manner that offers them the exact same opportunity that we mere merchants have: to serve customers.  The impoverishment you imagine is the cessation of taxpayer-funded indolence.  The poor babies will actually have to provide a value.

3. These welfare queens presently deny the rest of us the good of their genius and innovation.  The fact that they congregate at the trough means they are not competing and widening the division of labor, adding to the myriad of goods and services that constitute the true wealth of a nation.

4. How, in a free market, does anyone gain exceptional wealth?  Without government monopoly, subsidies and restrictions, freedom to compete surely militates against exceptional wealth, defined as lots of money.  What happens is the mundane hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis... people see a good profitable idea in action, tweak their own version until it recompenses satisfactorily, and at the same time someone is studying both successes coming up with another unit in the division of labor, with everyone trimming the profits of anyone enjoying excess, by serving a segment of customers more better cheaper faster.  Yet, all are self-employed and self supporting, and the range of goods and services ever widening.  More better cheaper faster. Think of telephones 1970, and telephones today. Unimaginable advances. Next, cancer cures, 25 bucks each, and profitable at that.

This isn't fantasy, we should all visit Hong Kong for a glimpse of the possible.


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