(Public Domain/CC0) 2025 Chris DeBoy
Free markets are the epitome of individual rights and freedom.
Free markets only occur when all parties of a transaction are participating voluntarily. If at any point coercion is involved, as a matter of definition, it is not free.
Society is able to best flourish when each individual is free to exercise their will through the pursuit of their own rational self-interest. Since every individual has their own unique set of values, needs, and desires, only they can best determine what actions they can take to best reach their ends. Left to their own devices, in pursuit of rational self-interest, the individual seeks the path they believe will best lead them to long-term survival and prosperity, not short-term immediate gratification. A rational actor will recognize that their long-term interests are best served creating value, respecting the rights of others, and forming mutually beneficial relationships
Planned economies, on the other hand, will ultimately lead to failure due to compounding inefficiencies inherent to them:
Knowledge problem - central planners lack all the local and specialized knowledge that millions of individuals have, and cannot account for local needs
Price Calculation problem - Without emergent prices to indicate where consumer demand is focused, there's no way to determine where to most efficiently allocate resources
Incentive Problem - central planners are rewarded for meeting numerical targets, not consumer needs
Innovation Deficits - central planning has little incentive for innovation and risk-taking, as bureaurocratic approval is necessary and failure is often punished.
Resource Misallocation - without price signals, resources flow to politically beneficial ends, rather than their most productive outlets
Grey & Black Markets - inefficient official allocation incentivises the formation of illegal parallel markets that operate outside of planning -- with black markets operating by immoral means
Corruption and Rent-Seeking - the concentration of economic decision-making power creates opportunities for corruption and political favoritism
Misinformation - State agents, in orer to create the appearance of meeting targets to avoid punishment will manipulate data, further obfuscating problems
I intend to convince everyone that socialists are the creationists of economics, and that those who advocate for mixed economies are like the creationists who say "Well, I believe in adaptation/micro-evolution, but not macro-evolution..."
Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.
The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can be violated only by means of force. In a capitalist society, no man or group may initiate the use of physical force against others. The only function of the government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man’s rights, i.e., the task of protecting him from physical force; the government acts as the agent of man’s right of self-defense, and may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; thus the government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of force under objective control.
A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)
The concept of a “right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.
Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive—of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.
The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.
Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.
The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness—which means: the values required for man’s survival qua man—which means: the values required for human survival—not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the “aspirations,” the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered an industrial society and can conceive of no self-interest but that of grabbing the loot of the moment.
The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash—that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.
Larger businesses are typically made possible through state action such as regulations, subsidies, and corporate welfare.
Large businesses are disadvantageous in unregulated markets
Internal pricing calculation problem
Cost more to operate - more employees to pay, more assets to maintain, and more liabilities
Dunbar's number comes into effect
More layers of bureaurocracy to go through in order to change course to meet market demands
More assets to either liquidate or retool if necessary
Harder to ensure incompetent people are kept out -- Dilbert Principle comes into effect
Small businesses are more agile and better able to meet changing market demands
Smaller number of people to run updated plans by
Many operations are outsourced meaning internal prices are known
Many operations are outsourced making it easier to change plans by severing ties with those businesses
Far lower costs to operate
With less assets, there is far more drive to create a product that will bring in money
Dow chemical Vs Die Deutsche Bromkonvention:
DDB sold bromine at $0.49/lb
Dow sold bromine for $0.36/lb
DDB threatened Dow with flooding the US market with cheap bromine if they ever sold it that cheap in Europe.
1904 Dow sold bromine in England
DDB flooded the US market with bromine for $0.15/lb
Dow bought up that bromine, repackaged it and sold it in Europe, including Germany at $0.27/lb
In order to do that, Dow pulled out of the US market entirely and utilized their production to supply foreign demand
DDB did not anticipate this, and had no idea who was doing this, thought one of their members was undercutting them. They also had no idea why the demand for bromine went so high in the US and cut their prices to $0.12/lb, then to $0.10.5/lb
Dow was still selling in Europe for $0.27/lb
DDB finally relented and sold bromine at a competetive price in Europe and the monopoly was broken.
Businesses exist to make money
Customers will take their money to businesses who they believe best provides value for their needs
Businesses are naturally incentivised to produce enough product for demand for as high a quality and as low a price as possible
The cost of aggression far exceeds the profit that can be gained
Natural monopolies don't really exist
Why are monopolies bad?
[Appeal to consequence]
How is the government not a monopoly?
ALCOA
Had a natural monopoly on aluminum production
Over time, their prices continually fell on aluminum, despite no other companies existing to produce aluminum
Those prices fell because while they were the only ones making aluminum, there were still other materials they were still competing with, such as steel or wood
Standard Oil
Standard Oil made up the overwhelming majority of the market, yet kept driving down prices due to driving down production costs in order to out-compete their competition.
They had also tried buying up competition, which signaled to others that there was demand for oil companies, which led to a market of people creating oil companies for Std. Oil to buy
Roads
Roads and train tracks were historically privately built, often by companies/merchants who wanted to bring their goods to consumers.
Even today, private companies are employed to build roads, so where they get money from would be all that changes.
Security
Private Military Corps
Private Police
Like private military corps, are more efficient
Public police have a terrible track record of wrongful deaths
Personal arms
Firearms stop far more crimes each year than are used to commit them
Criminals are less likely to aggress on people they know could be armed
Welfare
Mutual Aid Societies
Members would pay into it to pool resources for emergencies and maintaining community welfare.
Covered stuff like healthcare
In order to ensure payouts were fair and a few people wouldn't drain the funds, there were restrictions placed on what kinds of actions you could take, so as disincentivise risky behavior.
Eventually, one member will try to make more money by offering a better deal, thus undercutting other members of the cartel
Inflation is caused by an inflation of monetary supply, not a rise in prices
If businesses could just raise their prices at any time, why do they wait until the specific times they do to raise them?
Operate more as monopoly protections by artificially raising the barrier to entry in order to keep out competition
Price Caps
Prices indicate supply and/or demand
Limiting profit disincentivises production, leading to shortages
If demand is high, but prices are forced to stay low, people will stockpile, leading to shortages
Rent Control
See price caps
Rent control incentivises people to remain in apartments larger than they need for longer, as the price hasn't risen with the market
Fiat
Not backed by an actual commodity
No physical resource limiting how much of it can be issued.
Since it can be issued ad infinitum, there is no ceiling to inflation
Money
Backed by an actual commodity or something of limited supply
Since it's backed by something of limited supply, only as much as there is supply can be issued.
Since the amount that can be issued is limited, their value can remain stable, if not deflationary
Has no incentive to provide good services
The free market will always provide better services than the gov't since the gov't is guaranteed income through taxation and printing more money - see profit incentive
If anything, has incentives to not improve things, and if anything, make things worse, so as to ensure there are issues for politicians to run on.
People think it's a human rights organization -- but it isn't:
If anything, it operates much like a mob
Individuals are forced to pay into it for "protection"
If they don't pay into it, the gov't aggresses upon them
Participation is compulsory with no way to unsubscribe
Since its income is guaranteed through coerscion it has no profit incentive
With no profit incentive, there's no possible fail state