Language can sometimes blind us to reality. Sometimes this can be used as a weapon to deceive people. I think of the word "liberal" as currently used in America today. When one is liberal, this means one believes in liberty. The word liberal still has that meaning in Europe today. European-type liberals are called libertarians in America nowadays. But let's jump to a word that causes lots of confusion and damage to the cause of liberty: Market.
When libertarians talk about The Market or The Free Market, or The Voluntary Market, we're talking about the network of voluntary interactions between all human beings. This is everything from buying a fruit at the grocery store to buying shares of stock in a company to lending my neighbor a ladder so he can work on his roof.
Our understanding of human nature and human action leads us to believe that two people engaging in exchange only do so because they believe it will make them better off. How do we know this? Well, if it were the case that one or both parties didn't believe they would be made better off, they wouldn't have entered into the exchange in the first place. That is the essence of The Free Market.
Well what about Health Care? That's a market, too, isn't it? Same goes for the carbon credit market, right? Well, no. Though indeed it is a market, i.e., there's buying and selling going on, it's anything but a Free Market. All that amounts to is a highly regulated sector of the economy where the government uses the mechanics of a market to acheive a certain outcome. When this system fails, or has poor results, people then blame "markets," which leads people into thinking that The Free Market is also a failure.
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen