Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Most nations use markets: I make shoes & trade them to you for corn because that's what I want, and you want shoes. Markets work well with liberty because it's you deciding what to exchange for, from who & rather it's worth making the exchange at all. Markets depend on an adversarial relationship, each side trying to maximize their leverage for the maximum personal gain, which turns out to be a net increase for both sides or the exchange would not occur.

Market economies are very efficient: goods & services go to wherever there's the best return, and additional goods become available quickly to fill any unmet need. Similarly, if some product falls out of demand, production shifts to other goods whose demand is raising, or that can be poached from less-efficient producers, so that efficiency is also ever increasing. Unfortunately, markets are easily compromised by non-marketplace leverage from government, activists, collusion, monopoly & crime.

Supply & demand seems simple enough & markets certainly benefit both producers & consumers and efficiency is forced to improve: what's there not to like? Well, markets are uncompromising & brutal, if those are words that concern you. Inefficient people are abandoned even quicker than inefficient products, and some people have a lot more choices than others.

In a socialist society, this conflicts with the imperative of “most good to the most people,” so there is pressure to allocate goods and resources more “fairly.” Also, markets are subject to disruption where old products & industries are displaced new ones. To minimize this tendency, the socialist “efficiency” prerogative tends towards a command economy where people-who-know-better-than-me take my shoes and give me what they think I need in a fairer, more efficient manner, according to them anyway.