-See all writings in this series-
This week we covered the market, and how freedom relates to the results of the market and poverty. First I had to read John Locke: His Harmony Between Liberty and Virtue, by Donald J. Devine. There were a few good snippets from this, but really on their own they are pretty hard to understand. Though one snippet, which is proved a bit more through some of the writings:
Government remains limited in civil society because God gave man the ability, through work and reason, to subdue the earth and thereby improve his life by the use of private property.
Then this week we had to read Federalist No. 10 from the Federalist Papers. I covered this in a previous writing, so I won’t cover it again.
Next we had to read another article from Donald J. Devine called, Adam Smith and the Problem of Justice in Capitalist Society. An early quote from this about the market is when he said:
if any system is to survive it must attempt to guarantee justice
The whole concept of these readings was to talk about what role government should play in a free market. A few relevant quotes in this regard from this writing are (and I believe these actually come from Adam Smith):
But outside of the function of protecting from injury, every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interests in his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.
…
first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every other member of it. . ., and, thirdly, the duty of enacting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions.
Next we had to read Property in History from The Noblest Triumph by Tom Bethell. This goes back to the quote from Devine above about the use of private property.
Tom shares two things to prove this point:
The World Bank made the case in its World Development Report (1992): “When people have open access to forests, pastureland, or fishing grounds they tend to over use them.
Next he shared of a point of view where people were given ownership of something:
This (banning the sale of ivory) was hazardous to the elephant. If a ban is successful, the animal is deprived of most of its economic value. Trying to preserve it by such methods is like trying to conserve cows by banning the consumption of beef. There are millions of cattle in the United States because they are profitable. Keeping elephants for the benefit of sightseers in protected parks may be a way of preserving hundreds, or perhaps a few thousand of them, but privatized elephants would be preserved in the millions. Indeed, the high value of the ivory is their life insurance policy. Allowing rural people to make money from elephants gives them a strong incentive to protect them from poachers.
Ownership of property has people take personal pride in it.
To wrap the week up we read Economic Policy and the Rule of Law from The Constitution of Liberty by F.A. Hayek and went over several charts that showed the relationship of freedom and prosperity.
The quotes from this kind of speak for themselves, so I will throw some down here:
Freedom of economic activity had meant freedom under the law, not the absence of all government action.
To Adam Smith and his immediate successors the enforcement of the ordinary rules of common law would certainly not have appeared as government interference; nor would they ordinarily have applied this term to an alteration of these rules or the passing of a new rule by the legislature so long as it was intended to apply equally to all people for an indefinite period of time.
In other words, it is the character rather than the volume of government activity that is important.
But those who pursue distributive justice will in practice find themselves obstructed at every move by the rule of law.
In essence… a free market isn’t fully free, but fully equal by the same rules. And those rules need to have a great character to not infringe on the free market to greatly.
Next we went over several graphs that were a bit stunning in nature. It becomes quite obvious that the more freedom a country allows the more prosperity it has. Actually all of the graphs came from this website for 2005, though you can flip through the years to see the difference. Then we went through some charts from the Heritage Foundation. Which I will admit, I’ve never heard of but while looking at their site now I am very impressed.
So I’ll call that a week.
[Initially Written 2.14.2009]