Mere “privatization” in the absence of a functioning legal system is not the same as creating a market. Markets rest on a foundation of law; failed privatizations are not failures of the market, but failures of the state to create the legal foundations for markets.

While money prices may go up in the short time when prices are freed, the result is to increase production and diminish wasteful rationing and corruption, with the result that total real prices — expressed in terms of a basic commodity, human labor time — goes down.

When trade takes place in free markets, both parties win. Free societies also lead to the “circulation of elites,” with no one guaranteed a place or kept from entering by accident of birth. The phrase “the rich get richer and the poor gets poorer” applies, not to free markets, but to mercantilism and political cronyism,…

There is no contradiction between the market and art and culture. Market exchange is not the same as artistic experience or cultural enrichment, but it is a helpful vehicle for advancing both.

In market competition, the losers are not eaten by the winners, as is the case in biological competition. When business firms die, they are replaced by more efficient firms, and the investors, owners, managers, and employees are released to join more efficient firms.

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. Food, certainly a more basic need than…

Market processes redistribute wealth, giving owners of assets incentives to maximize their value or to shift their assets to those who will. Political processes redistribute property, making property in general less valuable and destroying wealth. Those with the power to transfer property in the name of equality inevitably use it to benefit themselves, and the…