“The Free Market Ignores the Poor!”

By Leonard E. Read

Once an activity has been socialized for a spell, nearly everyone will concede that that’s the way it should be.

Without socialized education, how would the poor get their schooling? Without the socialized post office, how would farmers receive their mail except at great expense? Without social security, the aged would end their years in poverty! If power and light were not socialized, consider the plight of the poor families in the Tennessee Valley!

Agreement with the idea of state absolutism follows socialization, appallingly. Why? One does not have to dig very deep for the answer.

Once an activity has been socialized, it is impossible to point out, by concrete example, how men in a free market could better conduct it. How, for instance, can one compare a socialized post office with private postal delivery when the latter has been outlawed? It’s something like trying to explain to a people accustomed only to darkness how things would appear were there light. One can only resort to imaginative construction.

To illustrate the dilemma: During recent years, men in free and willing exchange (the free market) have discovered how to deliver the human voice around the earth in one twenty-seventh of a second; how to deliver an event, like a ball game, into everyone’s living room, in color and in motion, at the time it is going on; how to deliver hundreds of people from Los Angeles to Baltimore in less than 3 hours and 19 minutes; how to deliver gas from a hole in Texas to a range in New York at low cost and without subsidy; how to deliver 64 ounces of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard — more than half-way around the earth — for less money than government will deliver a one-ounce letter across the street in one’s home town. Yet, such commonplace free market phenomena as these, in the field of delivery, fail to convince most people that “the post” could be left to free market delivery without causing many people to suffer.

Now, then, resort to imagination: Imagine that our Federal government, at its very inception, had issued an edict to the effect that all boys and girls, from birth to adulthood, were to receive shoes and stockings from the Federal government “for free.” Next, imagine that this practice of “for free” shoes and stockings had been going on for lo, these 181 years! Lastly, imagine one of our contemporaries — one with a faith in the wonders that can be wrought by men when free — saying, “I do not believe that shoes and stockings for kids should be a government responsibility. Properly, that is a responsibility of the family. This activity should never have been socialized. It is appropriately a free market activity.”

What, under these circumstances, would be the response to such a stated belief? Based on what we hear on £ every hand, once an activity has been socialized for a short time, the common chant would go like this, “Ah, but you would let the poor children go unshod!”

However, in this instance, where the activity has not yet been socialized, we are able to point out that the poor children are better shod in countries where shoes and stockings are a family responsibility than in countries where they are a government responsibility. We are able to demonstrate that the poor children are better shod in countries that are more free than in countries that are less free.

True, the free market ignores the poor precisely as it does not recognize the wealthy— it is “no respecter of persons.” It is an organizational way of doing things, featuring openness, which enables millions of people to cooperate and compete without demanding a preliminary clearance of pedigree, nationality, color, race, religion, or wealth. It demands only that each person abide by voluntary principles, that is, by fair play. The free market means willing exchange; it is impersonal justice in the economic sphere and excludes coercion, plunder, theft, protectionism, and other anti-free market ways by which goods and services change hands.

Admittedly, human nature is defective, and its imper- fections will be reflected in the market. But the free market opens the way for men to operate at their moral best, and all observation confirms that the poor fare bet- ter under these circumstances than when the way is closed, as it is under socialism.