The great free market economist Milton Friedman once said, “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.” This is true, and not just from a purely economic standpoint. The same Marxist globalists who are wrecking free economies and transforming them into socialist basketcases are the same who want a world where you own nothing, eat bugs, and require government authorization for everything. They not only don’t believe in freedom, they see freedom for citizens as a threat and an evil.
The full Friedman quote reads, “A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it … gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.” Ah, there’s the key! A free market gives people what they want instead of what a certain group tells people they should want.
For instance, the majority of Americans don’t want to phase out gas-powered cars, and yet the Democrats are coordinating and colluding and planning to phase out gas cars altogether in favor of electric vehicles (EVs) that many can’t afford. You are not allowed to want a gas car, you must want an EV or public transport because that is what the enlightened elite tell you that you should want.
Anti-free market advocates, particularly Marxists, are usually inherently elitist and power-hungry. A free market drives them mad because they cannot fully control either the market or the consumers. Whereas in a Communist or pseudo-socialist system (which we begin to have now in the U.S.), the government can pressure or even outright force businesses into ending certain products, promoting others, and serving only those individuals of whom the government approves. That’s exactly how the economy works in Communist China.
Friedman had another brilliant observation applicable to socialist or pseudo-socialist financial systems: “I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government.”
This is why the Founding Fathers tried so hard to keep the federal government within certain strict limits and why the Founders opposed a federal income tax. Government doesn’t produce anything on its own; it only takes money from producers. And, unsurprisingly, when the money isn’t yours and you put no effort into earning it, you become cavalier and spendthrift, funding this program or project and starting this new government agency and not caring when money is wasted.
What is the point of all this? The welfare state in America needs to end, as do most (unconstitutional) federal programs and agencies; but that, you might say, is unrealistic. Unfortunate but true, at least all at once. What we citizens have more control over, however, is saving this country from going full socialist, from becoming a place where people are allowed to have only what they are told to want by the elites.
Boycotts against woke companies, votes for responsible spenders (there are a few left in politics), and a refusal to bow to woke ideology in the public square are good ways of preserving what is left of our free market system. And we must preserve it, or we will soon have a world where we own nothing, go nowhere, and are ordered to enjoy it.
