The Free Market versus the Bureaucratic State

Richard Ebeling emails:

Dear Bob,

I have a new article on the news and commentary website, “EpicTimes,” on, “The Free Market versus the Bureaucratic State.”

The presidential election campaign 2016 has already started, and candidates attempting to win their party’s nomination are bombarding us with appeals for support, money, and votes.

This includes reminders by the candidates and the media on the importance of participating in the great manifestation of self-rule: political democracy.  However, it is worth remembering that for the Founding Fathers there was a different and far more important meaning to “self-governing.”

This was the freedom of the individual to live his own life as he chose in pursuit of its own goals and purposes secure in his liberty and honestly acquired property. In this context, the real “democratic” institutional system is the free market on which individuals decide on their own place in the division of labor to earn a living, earn an income by peacefully and voluntarily servicing their fellow citizens in the arena of exchange, and then using their income to buy the goods and services that best enable them to advance the goals, values and purposes that give meaning and happiness to their live, while everyone else is doing the same.

Political “democracy” offers none of the true pluralism that the competitive market provides. Political “self-governing” limits the individual to having to persuade multitudes of others to agree with him to have the outcome he wants on Election Day. And he only can try to change government personal and policy once every few years, depending on his country’s cycle of elections.

Furthermore, whether he wants what gets approved in an election or not, he is forced to pay for part of it through compulsory taxation, and is limited in his choices and options to what the government, through its bureaucracy, supplies and often compels the use of.

The political mystique that envelops modern democracy tries to persuade that the essence of what it means for people to be self-governing is the ballot box.

This hides from view and understanding that the far more important self-governing is the one under which the individual has the liberty to choose and guide his own life, while others do the same, and in which they all cooperate in mutually fulfilling what each wants to a great extent through the pluralistic outcomes of the market process.

Understanding this clarifies how much and how little is really at stake in political elections, the results of which too often co-opts the real democracy of the competitive market place.

http://www.epictimes.com/richardebeling/2015/08/the-free-market-versus-the-bureaucratic-state/

Best,
Richard