Tag: Freedom

When thinking about the difference between government action and action taken by free people trading voluntarily in markets, we find that many myths abound. Tom G. Palmer has written an important paper that confronts these myths about markets. The twelfth myth — Markets Lead to More Inequality than Non-Market Processes — and Palmer’s refutation is below. The complete series of myths and responses is at Twenty Myths about Markets.

Palmer is editor of the recent book The Morality of Capitalism. He will be in Overland Park and Wichita in May speaking on the moral case for capitalism. For more information and to register for these events see The Morality of Capitalism. An eleven minute podcast of Palmer speaking on this topic is at The Morality of Capitalism.

Myth: Markets Lead to More Inequality than Non-Market Processes

Myth: 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.

Tom G. Palmer: 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% to an average of 2.5%), 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.

When thinking about the difference between government action and action taken by free people trading voluntarily in markets, we find that many myths abound. Tom G. Palmer has written an important paper that confronts these myths about markets. The eleventh myth — Too Much Reliance on Markets Is As Silly as Too Much Reliance on Socialism: the Best is the Mixed Economy — and Palmer’s refutation is below. The complete series of myths and responses is at Twenty Myths about Markets.

Palmer is editor of the recent book The Morality of Capitalism. He will be in Overland Park and Wichita in May speaking on the moral case for capitalism. For more information and to register for these events see The Morality of Capitalism. An eleven minute podcast of Palmer speaking on this topic is at The Morality of Capitalism.

Myth: Too Much Reliance on Markets Is As Silly as Too Much Reliance on Socialism: the
Best is the Mixed Economy

Myth: Most people understand that it’s unwise to put all your eggs in one basket. Prudent investors diversify their portfolios and it’s just as reasonable to have a diversified “policy portfolio,” as well, meaning a mix of socialism and markets.

Tom G. Palmer: Prudent investors who don’t have inside information do indeed diversify their portfolios against risk. If one stock goes down, another may go up, thus evening out the loss with a gain. Over the long run, a properly diversified portfolio will grow. But policies aren’t like that. Some have been demonstrated time and time gain to fail, while others have been demonstrated to succeed. It would make no sense to have a “diversified investment portfolio” made up of stocks in firms that are known to be failing and stocks in firms that are known to be succeeding; the reason for diversification is that one doesn’t have any special knowledge of which firms are more likely to be profitable or unprofitable.

Studies of decades of economic data carried out annually by the Fraser Institute of Canada and a world wide network of research institutes have shown consistently that greater reliance on market forces leads to higher per capita incomes, faster economic growth, lower unemployment, longer life spans, lower infant mortality, falling rates of child labor, greater access to clean water, health care, and other amenities of modern life, including cleaner environments, and improved governance, such as lower rates of official corruption and more democratic accountability. Free markets generate good results.

Moreover, there is no “well balanced” middle of the road. State interventions into the market typically lead to distortions and even crises, which then are used as excuses for yet more interventions, thus driving policy one direction or another. For example, a “policy portfolio” that included imprudent monetary policy, which increases the supply of money faster than the economy is growing, will lead to rising prices. History has shown repeatedly that politicians tend to respond, not by blaming their own imprudent policies, but by blaming an “overheated economy” or “unpatriotic speculators” and imposing controls on prices. When prices are not allowed to be corrected by supply and demand (in this case, the increased supply of money, which tends to cause the price of money, as expressed in terms of commodities, to fall), the result is shortages of goods and services, as more people seek to buy limited supplies of goods at the below-market price than producers are willing to supply 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.

When thinking about the difference between government action and action taken by free people trading voluntarily in markets, we find that many myths abound. Tom G. Palmer has written an important paper that confronts these myths about markets. The tenth myth — Markets Lead to Disastrous Economic Cycles, Such as the Great Depression — and Palmer’s refutation is below. The complete series of myths and responses is at Twenty Myths about Markets.

Palmer is editor of the recent book The Morality of Capitalism. He will be in Overland Park and Wichita in May speaking on the moral case for capitalism. For more information and to register for these events see The Morality of Capitalism. An eleven minute podcast of Palmer speaking on this topic is at The Morality of Capitalism.

Myth: Markets Lead to Disastrous Economic Cycles, Such as the Great Depression

Myth: Reliance on market forces leads to cycles of “boom and bust,” as investor overconfidence feeds on itself, leading to massive booms in investment that are inevitably followed by contractions of production, unemployment, and a generally worsening economic condition.

Tom G. Palmer: Economic cycles of “boom and bust” are sometimes blamed on reliance on markets. The evidence, however, is that generalized overproduction is not a feature of markets; when more goods and services are produced, prices adjust and the result is general affluence, not a “bust.” When this or that industry expands beyond the ability of the market to sustain profitability, a process of self-correction sets in and profit signals lead resources to be redirected to other fields of activity. There is no reason inherent in markets for such correction to apply to all industries; indeed, it is self-contradictory (for if investment is being taken away from all and redirected to all, then it’s not being taken away from all in the first place).

Nonetheless, prolonged periods of general unemployment are possible when governments distort price systems through foolish manipulation of monetary systems, a policy error that is often combined with subsidies to industries that should be contracting and wage and price controls that keep the market from adjusting, thus prolonging the unemployment. Such was the case of the Great Depression that lasted from 1929 to the end of World War II, which economists (such as Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman) showed was caused by a massive and sudden contraction in the money supply by the U.S. Federal Reserve system, which was pursuing politically set goals. The general contraction was then deepened by the rise in protectionism, which extended the suffering worldwide, and prolonged greatly by such programs as the National Recovery Act, programs to keep farm prices high (by destroying huge quantities of agricultural products and restricting supply), and other “New Deal” programs that were aimed at keeping market forces from correcting the disastrous effects of the government’s policy errors.

More recent crashes, such as the Asian financial crisis of 1997, have been caused by imprudent monetary and exchange rate policies that distorted the signals to investors. Market forces corrected the policy failures of governments, but the process was not without hardship; the cause of the hardship was not the medicine that cured the disease, but the bad monetary and exchange rate policies of governments that caused it in the first place.

With the adoption of more prudent monetary policies by governmental monetary authorities, such cycles have tended to even out. When combined with greater reliance on market adjustment processes, the result has been a reduction in the frequency and severity of economic cycles and long-term and sustained improvement in those countries that have followed policies of freedom of trade, budgetary restraint, and the rule of law.

When thinking about the difference between government action and action taken by free people trading voluntarily in markets, we find that many myths abound. Tom G. Palmer has written an important paper that confronts these myths about markets. The ninth myth — Markets Don’t Work in Developing Countries — and Palmer’s refutation is below. The complete series of myths and responses is at Twenty Myths about Markets.

Palmer is editor of the recent book The Morality of Capitalism. He will be in Overland Park and Wichita in May speaking on the moral case for capitalism. For more information and to register for these events see The Morality of Capitalism. An eleven minute podcast of Palmer speaking on this topic is at The Morality of Capitalism.

Myth: Markets Don’t Work in Developing Countries

Myth:Markets work well in countries with well developed infrastructures and legal systems, but in their absence developing countries simply cannot afford recourse to markets. In such cases, state direction is necessary, at least until a highly developed infrastructure and legal system is developed that could allow room for markets to function.

Tom G. Palmer: In general, infrastructure development is a feature of the wealth accumulated through markets, not a condition for markets to exist, and the failure of a legal system is a reason why markets are underdeveloped, but that failure is a powerful reason to reform the legal system so it could provide the foundation for the development of markets, not to postpone legal reform and market development. The only way to achieve the wealth of developed countries is to create the legal and institutional foundations for markets so that entrepreneurs, consumers, investors, and workers can freely cooperate to create wealth.

All currently wealthy countries were once very poor, some within living memory. What needs explanation is not poverty, which is the natural state of mankind, but wealth. Wealth has to be created and the best way to ensure that wealth is created is to generate the incentives for people to do so. No system better than the free market, based on well defined and legally secure property rights and legal institutions to facilitate exchange, has ever been discovered for generating incentives for wealth creation. There is one path out of poverty, and that is the path of wealth creation through the free market. The term “developing nation” is frequently misapplied when it is applied to nations whose governments have rejected markets in favor of central planning, state ownership, mercantilism, protectionism, and special privileges. Such nations are not, in fact, developing at all. The nations that are developing, whether starting from relatively wealthy or relatively impoverished positions, are those that have created legal institutions of property and contract, freed markets, and limited the powers, the budget, and the reach of the state power.

When thinking about the difference between government action and action taken by free people trading voluntarily in markets, we find that many myths abound. Tom G. Palmer has written an important paper that confronts these myths about markets. The eighth myth — The More Complex a Social Order Is, the Less It Can Rely on Markets and the More It Needs Government Direction — and Palmer’s refutation is below. The complete series of myths and responses is at Twenty Myths about Markets.

Palmer is editor of the recent book The Morality of Capitalism. He will be in Overland Park and Wichita in May speaking on the moral case for capitalism. For more information and to register for these events see The Morality of Capitalism. An eleven minute podcast of Palmer speaking on this topic is at The Morality of Capitalism.

Myth: The More Complex a Social Order Is, the Less It Can Rely on Markets and the More It Needs Government Direction

Myth: Reliance on markets worked fine when society was less complicated, but with the tremendous growth of economic and social connections, government is necessary to direct and coordinate the actions of so many people.

If anything, the opposite is true. A simple social order, such as a band of hunters or gatherers, might be coordinated effectively by a leader with the power to compel obedience. But as social relations become more complex, reliance on voluntary market exchange becomes more — not less — important. A complex social order requires the coordination of more information than any mind or group of minds could master. Markets have evolved mechanisms to transmit information in a relatively low cost manner; prices encapsulate information about supply and demand in the form of units that are comparable among different goods and services, in ways that voluminous reports by government bureaucracies cannot. Moreover, prices translate across languages, social mores, and ethnic and religious divides and allow people to take advantage of the knowledge possessed by unknown persons thousands of miles away, with whom they will never have any other kind of relationship. The more complex an economy and society, the more important reliance on market mechanisms becomes.

When thinking about the difference between government action and action taken by free people trading voluntarily in markets, we find that many myths abound. Tom G. Palmer has written an important paper that confronts these myths about markets. The seventh myth — Markets Don’t Work (or Are Inefficient) When There Are Negative or Positive Externalities — and Palmer’s refutation is below. The complete series of myths and responses is at Twenty Myths about Markets.

Palmer is editor of the recent book The Morality of Capitalism. He will be in Overland Park and Wichita in May speaking on the moral case for capitalism. For more information and to register for these events see The Morality of Capitalism.

Myth: Markets Don’t Work (or Are Inefficient) When There Are Negative or Positive Externalities

Myth: Markets only work when all of the effects of action are born by those who make the decisions. If people receive benefits without contributing to their production, markets will fail to produce the right amount. Similarly, if people receive “negative benefits,” that is, if they are harmed and those costs are not taken into account in the decision to produce the goods, markets will benefit some at the expense of others, as the benefits of the action go to one set of parties and the costs are borne by another.

Tom G. Palmer: The mere existence of an externality is no argument for having the state take over some activity or displace private choices. Fashionable clothes and good grooming generate plenty of positive externalities, as others admire those who are well clothed or groomed, but that’s no reason to turn choice of or provision of clothing and grooming over to the state. Gardening, architecture, and many other activities generate positive externalities on others, but people undertake to beautify their gardens and their buildings just the same. In all those cases, the benefits to the producers alone — including the approbation of those on whom the positive externalities are showered — are sufficient to induce them to produce the goods. In other cases, such as the provision of television and radio broadcasts, the public good is “tied” to the provision of other goods, such as advertising for firms; the variety of mechanisms to produce public goods is as great as the ingenuity of the entrepreneurs who produce them.

More commonly, however, it’s the existence of negative externalities that leads people to question the efficacy or justice of market mechanisms. Pollution is the most commonly cited example. If a producer can produce products profitably because he imposes the costs of production on others who have not consented to be a part of the production process, say, by throwing huge amounts of smoke into the air or chemicals into a river, he will probably do so. Those who breathe the polluted air or drink the toxic water will bear the costs of producing the product, while the producer will get the benefits from the sale of the product. The problem in such cases, however, is not that markets have failed, but that they are absent. Markets rest on property and cannot function when property rights are not defined or enforced. Cases of pollution are precisely cases, not of market failure, but of government failure to define and defend the property rights of others, such as those who breathe polluted air or drink polluted water. When people downwind or downstream have the right to defend their rights, they can assert their rights and stop the polluters from polluting. The producer can install at his own expense equipment or technology to eliminate the pollution (or reduce it to tolerable and non-harmful levels), or offer to pay the people downwind or downstream for the rights to use their resources (perhaps offering them a better place to live), or he must stop producing the product, because he is harming the rights of others who will not accept his offers, showing that the total costs exceed the benefits. It’s property rights that make such calculations possible and that induce people to take into account the effects of their actions on others. And it’s markets, that is, the opportunity to engage in free exchange of rights, that allow all of the various parties to calculate the costs of actions.

Negative externalities such as air and water pollution are not a sign of market failure, but of government’s failure to define and defend the property rights on which markets rest.

When thinking about the difference between government action and action taken by free people trading voluntarily in markets, we find that many myths abound. Tom G. Palmer has written an important paper that confronts these myths about markets. The sixth myth — Markets Cannot Possibly Produce Public (Collective) Goods — and Palmer’s refutation is below. The complete series of myths and responses is at Twenty Myths about Markets.

Palmer is editor of the recent book The Morality of Capitalism. He will be in Overland Park and Wichita in May speaking on the moral case for capitalism. For more information and to register for these events see The Morality of Capitalism.

Myth: Markets Cannot Possibly Produce Public (Collective) Goods

Myth: If I eat an apple, you can’t; consumption of an apple is purely rivalrous. If I show a movie and don’t want other people to see it, I have to spend money to build walls to keep out non-payers. Some goods, those for which consumption is non-rival and exclusion is costly, cannot be produced on markets, as everyone has an incentive to wait for others to produce them. If you produce a unit, I can just consume it, so I have no incentive to produce it. The same goes for you. The publicness of such goods requires state provision, as the only means to provide them. Such goods include not only defense and provision of a legal system, but also education, transportation, health care, and many other such goods. Markets can never be relied on to produce such goods, because non-payers would free-ride off of those who pay, and since everyone would want to be a free-rider, nobody would pay. Thus, only government can produce such goods.

Tom G. Palmer: The public goods justification for the state is one of the most commonly misapplied of economic arguments. Whether goods are rivalrous in consumption or not is often not an inherent feature of the good, but a feature of the size of the consuming group: a swimming pool may be non-rivalrous for two people, but quite rivalrous for two hundred people. And costs of exclusion are applicable to all goods, public or private: if I want to keep you from eating my apples, I may have to take some action to protect them, such as building a fence. Many goods that are non-rivalrous in consumption, such as a professional football game (if you see it, it doesn’t mean that I can’t see it, too), are produced only because entrepreneurs invest in means to exclude non-payers.

Besides not being an inherent feature of the goods per se, the alleged publicness of many goods is a feature of the political decision to make the goods available on a nonexclusive and even non-priced basis. If the state produces “freeways,” it’s hard to see how private enterprise could produce “freeways,” that is, zero-priced transportation, that could compete. But notice that the “freeway” isn’t really free, since it’s financed through taxes (which have a particularly harsh form of exclusion from enjoyment, known as jail), and also that the lack of pricing is the primary reason for inefficient use patterns, such as traffic jams, which reflect a lack of any mechanism to allocate scarce resources (space in traffic) to their most highly valued uses. Indeed, the trend around the world has been toward pricing of roads, which deeply undercuts the public goods argument for state provision of roads.

Many goods that are allegedly impossible to provide on markets have been, or are at present, provided through market mechanisms — from lighthouses to education to policing to transportation, which suggests that the common invocation of alleged publicness is unjustified, or at least overstated.

A common form of the argument that certain goods are allegedly only producible through state action is that there are “externalities” that are not contracted for through the price mechanism. Thus, widespread education generates public benefits beyond the benefits to the persons who are educated, allegedly justifying state provision and financing through general tax revenues. But despite the benefits to others, which may be great or small, the benefits to the persons educated are so great for them that they induce sufficient investment in education. Public benefits don’t always generate the defection of free-riders. In fact, as a wealth of research is demonstrating today, when states monopolize education they often fail to produce it for the poorest of the poor, who nonetheless perceive the benefits to them of education and invest substantial percentages of their meager incomes to educate their children. Whatever externalities may be generated by their children’s education does not stop them from paying their own money to procure education for their children.

Finally, it should be remembered that virtually every argument alleging the impossibility of efficient production of public goods through the market applies at least equally strongly– and in many cases much more strongly –to the likelihood that the state will produce public goods. The existence and operation of a just and law-governed state is itself a public good, that is, the consumption of its benefits is non-rivalrous (at least among the citizenry) and it would be costly to exclude non-contributors to its maintenance (such as informed voters) from the enjoyment of its benefits. The incentives for politicians and voters to produce just and efficient government are not very impressive, certainly when placed next to the incentives that entrepreneurs and consumers have to procure public goods through cooperation in the marketplace. That does not mean that the state should never have any role in producing public goods, but it should make citizens less willing to cede to the state additional responsibilities forproviding goods and services. In fact, the more responsibilities are given to the state, the less likely it is to be able to produce those public goods, such as defense of the rights of its citizens from aggression, at which it might enjoy special advantages.