If you care about freedom and liberty, you should understand free market economics
Some thoughts on economic freedom from Ludwig von Mises.
1. From feudalism to freedom. Before capitalism, your social status was set in stone. If you were born poor, you stayed poor. If you were born a lord, you enjoyed privilege for life. Manufacturing was exclusively for the rich. 90% toiled on the land, excluded from city industries. It was a rigid, unfair system. Industrialization offered a solution: mass production for the masses.
2. Capitalism is a consumer-first world. "Automobile kings" and “tech zillionaires” are not feudal lords. Business leaders in a capitalist society don't rule, they serve. Their power comes from consumers, not conquest. And this power is fleeting. Lose your customer's favor, and you lose your "kingdom".
3. Producers are consumers. The idea of a separate class of "producers" and "consumers" is a myth. The factory worker and the department store shopper are one and the same. Big business is only powerful as long as it serves its customers. If it lose its customers, it loses its influence.
4. Capitalism is literally a life saver. It supported unprecedented population growth (8x in 200 years) and a dramatically higher standard of living for all. In today’s capitalistic world, the "poor" live better than the rich of the pre-capitalist era. Ironically, even critics of capitalism are alive today because of it.
5. Savings generate benefits for all. Capitalism is built on capital accumulation. Saving and investing creates opportunities, fuels new projects, and ultimately benefits everyone. Business expansion creates jobs and raises demand for raw materials. Workers and producers benefit immediately, long before investors see any profit.
6. The exploitation myth. Early factory jobs were a lifeline for people living in unimaginable poverty. It wasn't capitalists who exploited workers, it was the pre-existing conditions they came from. Industrialization offered an escape from poverty and starvation — a chance at survival.
7. The loudest anti-capitalists were aristocracy. The first wave of anti-capitalism came not from the workers, but from the landed aristocracy. Why? Because rising industrial wages forced them to pay their farm workers more! They attacked factories, criticizing the (admittedly low) living standards of workers when the living standards for their workers were even worse.
8. The Iron Law of wages doesn’t exist. Marx was wrong because he studied humans like biologists study animals. The way increasing food supply leads to increasing children in mice, rising wages don't just lead to more children (who would lower wages by increasing labor supply), they lead to a higher standard of living. Human wants go beyond mere survival and reproduction.
9. Freedom is the only way to full employment. True full employment is only possible in a free labor market, where wages adjust based on supply and demand. Government intervention and union coercion only lead to unemployment.
10. Innovation, not imitation. Competition isn't about copying what others do. It's about finding better, cheaper ways to serve customers. Remember when railroads were considered unstoppable monopolies? Then came cars, buses, planes — competition that nearly wiped them out. This is the beauty of capitalism: the right to serve customers better and cheaper.
11. Inflation is a deceptive thief. Even if governments print money only for "good causes" (which almost no one would agree with today), the result is always the same: rising prices, a shrinking value of wages, increasing government debt, and eventual currency debasement.
12. Interventionism is a slippery slope to socialism. Controlling prices (which by the way always create shortages, never abundance) leads to controlling wages, then production, and ultimately concentrating power in the hands of the state. A central planning committee will always underperform a free market.
13. The path to prosperity. Society needs sound money, free markets, and increased capital investment to prosper. These are the tools that empower individuals and uplift nations. Not protectionism, not socialism, not interventionism.
14. True freedom is the right to be foolish. The privilege of freedom is right to make mistakes. No one can prevent people from making them, but of course people have to pay for their mistakes. Consumers very often buy things or consume things they ought not to buy or ought not to consume. But the notion that a form of government can prevent people from hurting themselves by controlling their consumption is false. Because interventionism eventually devolves into socialism.
15. The sovereign is not the state, it is the people. And the proof that they are the sovereign is borne out by the fact that they have the right to be foolish. This is the privilege of the sovereign. He has the right to make mistakes, no one can prevent him from making them, but of course he has to pay for his mistakes. If we say the consumer is supreme or that the consumer is sovereign, we do not say that the consumer is free from faults, that the consumer is a man who always knows what would be best for him. The consumers very often buy things or consume things they ought not to buy or ought not to consume.