I see the term used as if everybody understands it to refer to an absolute good. The Cato Institute, for example, calls "free markets" a "traditional American principle," right up there with individual liberty and peace. As if everybody understands that regulation of markets is an unnecessary evil, only to be tolerated barely, if at all.
Like the way food products are sold with the term "all-natural." If it's all natural, it must be good, right? And free markets are better than markets with regulation, right?
Well, let's hold it a minute.
Unless I have my homespun medicine wrong, leprosy and bubonic plague are all-natural. And completely unregulated markets gave us feudalism and snake oil salesmen.
The bottom line: "free market" only describes an unequivocal positive if you're in a position to exploit it. If that free market puts you in a position to get exploited, or to have to clean up the fallout of someone else's exploitation, then "free market" probably describes an unequivocal negative.
When we're talking about what's good public policy, "free market" shouldn't be swallowed as necessarily a good thing any more readily than we'd take a big gulp of all-natural crude oil.
No comments:
Post a Comment