Free Markets are Useful; They Are Not Moral

It is election season again, and you know what that means: Anybody to the left of Atilla the Hun is going to have to spend their time explaining why income tax is not against the 13th Amendment and why fishing licenses are not a form of tyranny. And it is when a certain portion of the media will do their best to convince us that we have gone so far down the road to socialism that we will soon be reserving the entire Mountain Time Zone for a new set of Gulags.

Actual history aside, we are all prepping for the great clash between communism and capitalism that occurs every four years in the dark recesses of our partisan minds. And it is all (or at least mostly) poppycock.

To true believers, both communism and capitalism are immune to historical critique. Tell a group of devout Marxists that communism has failed wherever it has been tried, and they will respond that it has never been tried. The “so-called communist societies” of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, they will say, were nothing like the pure Worker’s Utopias that Marx imagined.

It works about the same way with die-hard free-market types. Point to the abusive Industrial Revolution societies of 19th century England and America, and they will respond that these were nothing like a real free market. Read a few passages from Hard Times or The…