- Economics 101 Series Introduction
- James Madison on Property
- Everything I need to know about economics – by some French guy 160 years ago
- Van Jones tells Nutroots there’s plenty of (other people’s) money out there
- Obama Motors, electric cars, bankruptcy, and making economic sense
- Time for another trip to the woodshed for little Timmy Geithner: Economics 101 do over
- Who Pays for Paid Sick Leave?
- Can’t find any economics in Christina Romer’s advice
The Economics 101 Series is a series of posts on topics related to some basic things that citizens should understand about how things are supposed to work in a free market economy. One of the key ideas here is that we are talking about “free” markets. The notion of free markets goes hand in hand with the principle of property rights. The Founder’s understood that individual freedom and free markets were a desirable combination but in order for that to work individuals had to be secure in their rights “to” and their rights “in” their property. In their view of things the role of government was to protect those rights.
Free markets are very efficient and work very well. Where we run into problems is when government tries to control or “participate” in the market place. Whether a government impulse to control something in the market comes from over zealous politicians and government officials trying to “fix” a perceived problem or an impetus to “participate” in the market comes from individuals and/or businesses seeking the assistance of the government in order to gain some advantage in the market, the effect is pretty much the same. The free market becomes less free, the tampered with market becomes less effective and efficient, and the wealth of the nation is invariably less than what it would have been absent the government control or participation.
The concept of property is crucial to the understanding of free markets. James Madison’s explanation of how it is that an individual has both rights “to” property and rights “in” property and how that relates to freedom is about as good as it gets. Rephrasing these concepts or summarizing them and inadvertently omitting some key point would not do the subject justice; therefore this next post in this series contains James Madison’s exact words on the subject.
This post series is related to the Free Markets category.
Note: Series lead posts are backdated to May 2010 which is a month prior to launch date of Our Founder’s Compass. This is done so that of all series lead posts will appear in a month in the archive that does not contain any regular content posts. This helps with overall organization and provides a single location where a reader can review series lead series posts to learn what is in a particular series.
