The ABC of a Market Economy

by Henry Hazlitt
Mises.org

There are basically only two ways in which economic life can be organized. The first is by the voluntary choice of families and individuals and by voluntary cooperation. This arrangement has come to be known as the free market. The other is by the orders of a dictator. This is a command economy. In its more extreme form, when an organized state expropriates the means of production, it is called socialism or communism. Economic life must be primarily organized by one system or the other.

It can, of course, be a mixture, as it unfortunately is in most nations today. But the mixture tends to be unstable. If it is a mixture of a free and a coerced economy the coerced section tends constantly to increase.

One qualification needs to be emphasized. A “free” market does not mean and has never meant that everybody is free to do as he likes. Since time immemorial mankind has operated under a rule of law, written or unwritten. Under a market system as any other, people are forbidden to kill, molest, rob, libel or otherwise intentionally injure each other. Otherwise free choice and all other individual freedoms would be impossible. But an economic system must be dominantly either a free or a command system.

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