Blame freedom and you're wrong!

Warning - a completely un-structured thought only to be read with a good cup of fresh coffee in the blood!

The free market is the only justifiable form of communication-structure between individuals, their companies and State-rulers. It's core principles - individual freedom and protected private property rights - should never be interfered with, as long as these rights of one don't reduce the same rights of another. This is the free market as far as this author is concerned.

But in the public debate it's not enough to justify something - it also has to be supported with experiments, data and pragmatic reasons, such that the free market has proved to be the most beneficial tool to eliminate poverty of any other the human race has come up with, and that early measurements of economic freedom compared with life expectancy, health and wealth show that the more economic freedom a country has, the better the lives of its citizens.

This line of argument creates no problems for the supporter of the free market. Not only can the free market be justified with pretty clean abstract logic but it can also be argued for with extensive experience and data. However, when using the latter approach some problems come up in the debate, because the amount of different data available creates the possibility of arguing for everything based on some number or another.

Those who oppose the free market have realized this a long time ago. They can therefore dig up a number of different data-sets to "show" that the free market does more harm than many think, and in that way argue for the increased need to control it with regulations and taxes. Fortunately it can be shown in most cases that the problems of the free market are not related to its freedom, but its lack thereof. A few examples now follow:

Minority groups
Many groups are considered "vulnerable" in the free market society, and discrimination, poverty, ignorance and white people are blamed. Therefore most Western countries have implemented a broad variety of special helping-regulations and social support to "help" groups like women, immigrants, handicapped people and older individuals (to name a few!). The State-supported help involves, for example, regulations which make it hard to fire certain "vulnerable" individuals. This creates incentives to fire individuals who look like they are becoming "vulnerable", and to not hire those who are. Also, those the State is trying to protect begin to look at the State as its savior from hard conditions, which again decreases their incentives to fight on their own terms with their own competence as a weapon.

Minimum-wages are designed to help those who land the lowest-paid jobs. However, minimum-wages cause unemployment because employers are being forced to overpay certain jobs so they hire fewer employees than they would else had, again leading to an over-supply of workers which again will drive wages down.

The groups that remain behind, for example young or middle-aged white men, are left to fight on their own on the free market for market-wages and in market-controlled job-conditions. Individuals in these unhelped groups realize that the State can not be used to promote themselves and that the only way to succeed is to fight. Therefore it's usually the unhelped ones - those who receive no special attention from the State - that are the ones who get all the "good" jobs, which again encourages the politicians to increase help to the "vulnerable", thereby closing the circle.

In short, the lack of freedom on the free market could explain why the free market seems to show tendency towards rewarding certain groups more than others with the best and highest-paid jobs.

Environmental protection
Many think the free market can't be left on its own when it comes to environmental issues. It is said that companies, in their reach for bigger profits, show no regard for natural resources, natural wildlife and basically everything related to nature and environment. Experience shows, it is claimed,that companies have been accountable for many environmental disasters, and show no signs of changing their attitude despite all talk about the necessity of good treatment for nature.

But where does this experience come from? It doesn't come from developed countries. Some might say that regulations are to thank for that, but the reality is that private property is to be thanked. Private property means responsibility. A person or a company that pollutes my water supply must compensate the damage, just like sabotagers are sentenced to compensate for damage they make on buildings and other property of others. In the developing countries the prime reason behind companies chopping down rare tree-species and bulldozing rain-forests in the name of cow-production is the lack of private property rights. No company spills its property without taking steps to insure future income from its resource as long as possible - preferably forever. Exceptions are few at best. However, both companies and individuals gladly spill or over-use resources they have no direct relations to. A government that "hands out" a resource for a limited number of years, while always having the option or removing the license, is in fact encouraging the destruction of the resource.

Why would a company destroy nature and its wildlife? Isn't it a source of great negative publicity? Isn't tourism one of the biggest growing industries in the world? Wouldn't an unspoiled land go for a huge price on the free market to organizations that claim they want to protect the environment and nature as a whole? A company that destroys beautiful nature by chopping down forests and pushing rare animals to extinction is clearly working against its own interests, but then if there is no property in private-ownership that is being decreased in value, then there is hardly anyone who looses, so to speak.

So once again, the lack of freedom in the free market can be related to bad performance of many companies/individuals when it comes to protecting the environment. Where the freedom does exist, nature flourishes. That is the black-and-white lesson Europeans learned during the Cold War and its Iron Curtain of clean-West versus filthy-East.

The richer become rich and the poor become...?
Many have the misconception of thinking that in the free market the rich become richer and the poor become poorer. While the former is true, the latter most certainly is not. The free-er the market, the bigger the number of companies competing on it. The fewer the regulations and trade-tariffs, the fiercer the competition and the harder the price-wars. Sometimes huge monopolies arise. Lets name Boeing and Airbus as examples - both protected with regulations and sponsored with tax-money. What else? Wal-mart in America is pretty big, but can anyone say that it's because of lack of competition? Lets name another example - Microsoft. It has been hammered with a bad reputation among the self-acclaimed know-it-alls, smashed with fines and regulations and constantly faces competition from strong competitors like Apple and countless "open source" ones. Has the State-interference helped the consumer in even the tiniest little way?

No-one, I repeat no-one can logically or empirically demonstrate that competition law has done any good. A proof of otherwise is very welcomed! However, State-operated institutions that can without restraints dictate companies, their product-prices, their mergers and split-offs, and so on, have done a huge amount of damage. Companies haven't been able to price according to the laws of supply and demand, not been able to merge to cut costs to the consumer, and the list goes on.

If competition-law has ever done good, then that good can in no way match the bad they have done. How come international companies (outside the European Union) are not posing a great risk to consumers? Do the United Nations need to establish an international competition-court? Answer: No, because international competition flourishes in the absence of such a court. Globalization makes sure the local, vote-seeking politicians can't get too regulation-greedy in their attempts to suck up to lobbyists who are trying to protect their own skin by imposing restrictions upon others.

Lack of freedom is the suspect
This author will go so far as to say that everything negative about the free market is because of lack of freedom. Of course there's nothing perfect - not even in peaceful, volunteer communications between individuals and their companies, but that is not enough reason to implement something even more imperfect, namely a regulation-market dictated by politicians and based on forced communications on State-terms.