Howard Baetjer - Economics and Free Markets

CONTENTS

That a free economy works at all is one of the most remarkable things in human experience. How can billions of people acting in their individual self-interestand knowing little about the particular purposes or wishes of othersnevertheless manage to cooperate and produce for one another an ever-increasing abundance of goods and services with nobody in charge?

Some basic economic concepts help us understand and appreciate that marvel. The goal of this little book is to present those concepts and thereby help the reader understand why more economic freedom means more human flourishing.

As a primer, the book is intended for people who have not (yet) had the chance to study economics. As a pro-free-market book, it is also for those whose economics courses did not bring out the strong connection between economic freedom and human flourishing.

The book has two main goals. The first is to help the reader learn the economic way of thinking, the foundational concepts economists use to make sense of the economy. Those concepts, on which the rest of economics is based, are presented in Chapters 17: subjective value, scarcity, opportunity cost, thinking at the margin, comparative advantage, division of labor, and the famous supply and demand.

The second goal is to help readers understand why people need free markets to flourish. The underlying institutions of a free marketprivate ownership and freedom of exchangeare necessary to human well-being for three main reasons, addressed in Chapters 811.

First, we need the information that free-market prices give us. Market prices are a kind of telecommunications system; they communicate to everyone what everybody else individually knows about the availability of and need for various goods and services, and thereby they make it possible for us to coordinate our various actions. (We devote all of Chapter 9 to the problems caused by government interference with prices.)

Second, we need free-market profit and loss to guide business enterprise. Profit made in a free market signifies the creation of value for others; loss signifies the destruction of value. In a world where no one can be sure what to do today to make the world a better place tomorrow, this profit-and-loss guidance is indispensable.

Third, we need the incentives that free markets give us to serve others. In free markets, we all must consider the wishes of others in order to get from them what we want, because those others dont have to deal with us. That is not the case where government force may be used to get what we want from others against their wishes. In brief, free markets provide everyone the knowledge, the guidance, and the incentives we need to produce for one another in an extended order of human cooperation.

Economics has great explanatory power. It helps us understand much of what happens in the social world, and how free people benefit others as they seek to benefit themselves. I hope you enjoy this presentation of why that is so.

We begin with the concepts that underlie most everything in economics: (a) the nature of value and of wealth, (b) the meaning of scarcity and opportunity cost, (c) the fact that we generally make economic decisions at the margin, and (d) the benefits we all realize from specializing according to comparative advantage and trading with other specialists for the rest of what we need.

1
Subjective Value and Gains from Trade

We begin this introduction to economics by getting clear on some foundational concepts. In this chapter, we consider the nature of value, the gains we realize from trade, and the unlimited possibilities of wealth creation.

Value Is Subjective

Among the most important concepts in economics is that different people value things differently. Some people love seafood; others dislike it. Some enjoy watching football; others prefer old movies. Tastes in music vary widely. And the same person values the same thing differently in different times and situations. The value you put on a nice meal, for example, depends on how recently you last ate.

The term we use in economics for this fact is that value is subjective. Value is in the eye of the beholder, so to speak; it is in the person, the subject doing the valuing rather than in the object being valued.

Subjective value stands opposed to the older labor theory of value: the mistaken view (articulated by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations and taken up by Karl Marx as one of the foundations of his economic theory) that the value of any good is determined by the amount of labor required to produce it. A bottle of water, say, is held to be worth a dollar because a dollars worth of labor was required to obtain and filter the water, to produce the plastic of the bottle and the lid, to put the water in the bottle, and to produce and glue on its label.

But the labor theory of value is untenable. If it were true, then an apple pie that took four hours to produce would be worth the same amount as a mud pie that took the same four hours. Its not, because people dont like to eat mud. The tastes and preferences of the people doing the valuing are what determine somethings value.

Voluntary Trade Creates Wealth, Makes Traders Wealthier According to Their Own Values

That value is subjective has a wonderful consequence: people can make one another better off merely through trading, through exchange. When Jimmy prefers Teds backpack to his own skateboard, and Ted prefers Jimmys skateboard to his own backpack, the boys can exchange backpack for skateboard and make each boy better off according to his own subjective values. In an important sense, each boy is wealthier after the trade. When crabbers in my home state of Maryland trade blue crabs to Washington State apple growers for their apples, both groups are better offwealthier according to their different valuesas each group gives up what it values less for what it values more.

Notice how this insight about the mutual benefits from voluntary exchange contradicts the widespread notion that exchange is zero-sum, that in a market economy, some people benefit at the expense of others. The notion is there in the expression the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That implies that the rich get rich at the expense of the poor. We hear one mans loss is another mans gain, as if there is only a certain amount to go around, so that if one person becomes better off, someone else must have become worse off. Underlying a lot of the animus against haves is the notionperhaps unconscious and unexaminedthat the wealth of haves comes at the expense of have-nots.

But that is not true, as long as the wealthy earn their wealth in voluntary exchange (rather than through special privileges from government, such as bailouts, subsidies, or protected monopolies). Consider Steve Jobs, LeBron James, and Beyonc. They are all haves. Did they become wealthy at the expense of the rest of us? Not at all. They became wealthy by delighting us with their electronic devices, athletic prowess, and great songs and videos.

Invisible Hand Principle

That participants in voluntary exchange mutually benefit one another is so important that it can hardly be overemphasized. It has this important corollary: in a free and competitive economy, people who want more for themselves are guided, as if by an invisible hand, to benefit others. Why? Because in a free society, others dont have to interact with us at all. If we want something from others, we must persuade them to give it to us by offering them something they value more in return. In the words of my grad school professor Walter Williams: In a free market, you get more for yourself by serving your fellow man. You dont have to care about him! Just serve him.