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Thu Jul 20 13:41:04 2006 |
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> Fred Foldvary referred to a "pure free market."
> Would he or someone else point to where in the
literature one can find such a creature explicated?
> Fred Carstensen
One has to synthesize the concept from several works:
Murray Rothbard. Man, Economy, and State.
Henry George. Progress and Poverty.
David Friedman. Machinery of Freedom.
Ludwig von Mises. Socialism.
Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations included some
elements of a free market, but his conception was not
that of a pure free market, in contrast to the above
theorists who sought to more crisply analyze economic
freedom.
My recent paper on this is:
Fred Foldvary. "Markets Never Fail."
http://www.foldvary.net/works/mnflv1.html
Encyclopedic references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/FreeMarket.html
> Suggesting I gather that markets are--at least
> theoretically--not social constructs.
A pure free market is a social construct in one way
and not in another way.
It is a social construct in that voluntary human
action presumes that involuntary acts, those with
victims of coercive harm, can be penalized, and so
there are laws and institutions prohibiting and
penalizing coercive harm, as indeed recognized by Adam
Smith.
But a pure free market is not merely a social
construct in that the concept of voluntary human
action is not arbitrary, but is determined by an ethic
that is based on reason rather than arbitrary social
whim, as recognized explicitly by Rothbard, George,
and Locke. Utilitarians such as Mises and Hayek
implicitly recognized this as well.
Fred Foldvary
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