Posts in "markets"

By Elliot Engstrom at 1:26PM

Apr 21, 2010

Markets vs. Free Markets

Anna Morgenstern has a recent piece up at the Center for a Stateless Society talking about what distinguishes a market as "free." She writes:

Libertarians throw the phrase “free market” around a lot, but the important word among those two is free. Markets, per se, are really an after-thought. It’s not as if we don’t want freedom in our non-market activities. We want to have freedom, in all ways, including in our “market transactions”. The word market confuses a lot of people because they imagine “markets” to be an institution, a thing that one can point to and say “this is a Market”. But we don’t mean it that way, really. There’s no such thing as a market. It’s just a catch-all term to cover the sum total of all exchanges.
The only alternative to a market is to have rationing by command. One monopoly with control of all goods who hands them out to people according to a scheme that monopoly has planned out in advance. A situation where there is any sort of trade at all, is technically a market.

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By Elliot Engstrom at 9:37PM

Mar 14, 2010

Revisiting Capitalism and Markets

I made a post a few days ago questioning whether or not what we consider capitalism is actually the result of the free market. In it I mentioned a political-theorist named Kevin Carson, who has done extensive work in this area. The post has received over 50 comments, so I felt I should do a bit of follow-up. I unfortunately do not have the time to write a complete summary of Carson's work and a response to every comment, but I can point to two pieces of writing by Carson that hopefully can give a bit more insight into what I am referring to.

Firstly, there is this article which simply deals with the use of the word capitalism. While this might seem trivial, it is something we should be careful to understand when talking to people who do not consider themselves libertarian and do not necessarily give capitalism the same definition that we do. Carson writes:

The Freeman editor Sheldon Richman, speaking at George Mason University, raised the question of just what mainstream libertarians mean when they call a country “capitalist.” What qualifies a country as “capitalist”?