It’s not free markets that have failed us but government distortion of them

This seems so obvious to us. But we must admit it doesn’t seem obvious to many.

Part of this is just simple economic ignorance. Part of it is that what are called “free markets” are often not very free at all, thus skewing people’s understanding of such markets. (A better term is “free price system,” but that is for another post.) Part of it is opportunistic, anti-market/pro-state political people seizing on the central bank created 2008 Crash as some sort of indictment of capitalism and free markets even though 2008 represented a failure of CENTRAL PLANNING and not of free markets. Some of it is a media that is hostile to classical liberalism. Part of it is a president who riffs about economic matters on which he appears to know little. (Remember “You didn’t build that”?) Part of it is that the people who teach economics have a vested interest in being anti-free market. (Free markets tend not to be money makers for economists who are often paid very well to be “planners.”) Part of it is powerful corporations that have partnered with the government and reap big bucks from the government centered crony capitalist system that has emerged.

Ignorance, opportunism, poor leadership, planners, crony capitalists, it all adds up to bad policy time and time again.

The attached article is mostly good. It’s very very wrong on “anarcho-capitalism” however. Somalia (per the article) is an example of a state created vacuum, not anarcho-capitalism. Somalia would not be as it is if it were not for the fact that a chaotic Somalia serves our (mostly) ally Ethiopia and America’s general interests on the Horn of Africa. Somalia wouldn’t even exist if it were not for the state centered system of imperialism from the previous century. 

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/