With that good under attack today with increasing frequency, it’s good to recall what it is and what suffers when the attack succeeds. I’ve excerpted the following paragraphs from “What Is ‘The Free Market’?,” Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic (2019), 122-123.
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The free market is a good of order, as distinct from goods of immediate satisfaction. The regular enjoyment of such goods requires that persons explicitly regard the good of order as worthy of attainment and protection. (Not just, for example, “This meal for me now,” but also “Good meals for me and my family several times a day, every day.”)
Persons face a moral challenge when they realize that they can enjoy a good of immediate satisfaction only by rending the fabric of the good of order. In the name of eudaimonia[1], they must at times forfeit particular satisfactions.
Human beings enjoy essential freedom. They are free by nature. They can conceive of alternative futures, prefer one of them, understand the causal path to it, and act so as to set that causal chain in motion.
But although it is natural for them to honor the good of order, they are perfectly capable of perversely, self-destructively, dishonoring and undermining it. That is, they can perceive a conflict between the good of order and a satisfaction attainable only at the cost of that order and still subordinate the order to the satisfaction.
That is, although they are naturally ordered to pursue a good life, which depends upon the good of order, human beings can, through their exercise of essential freedom, irrationally act to undermine that good.
One consequence is the diminution and even loss of their effective freedom, a constriction of the range of choice. The smoker, for example, has less effective freedom to quit smoking than he or she had to start, even if his or her essential freedom to conceive of a smoke-free life has not diminished.
Human beings can, and do, inject the surd of sin into the historical equation, effectively “throwing a spanner in the works.” Sin is not just immoral: it is also irrational, absurd. There may be non-rational causes, but never a reason for it.
One way to describe history is as the story of pro-market and anti-market choices and their consequences. By counterfactual praxeological analysis, we can understand the logic of market exchange. By eudaimonistic criteria, we can morally approve of the pro-market side (peaceful offers of exchange of justly acquired property and responses thereto) because it favors human flourishing; anti-market choices (violent interference with peaceful offers and responses thereto) invite only deterioration, poverty, enslavement and other miseries, and which can logically terminate only in human extinction. And if that most unnatural telos is programmed, so to speak, into the anti-eudaimonistic ethic of anti-market ideologies, then they have no ethics worthy of the name.
Freedom and the attempt to suppress it are not ontologically on the same footing, any more than are natural living shoots and the artificial concrete slabs that, although temporarily stronger, will crack and crumble as the burgeoning tree slowly but surely pushes through. One is in accord with man’s nature, for it promotes his flourishing; the other, unnatural and potentially fatal to him. The free market that human beings generate, however imperfectly and inconsistently, is therefore as real as they are, and attempts to hamper it are only as real as sin, surds for which there are no reasons and which enjoy no permanent abode.
Note
[1] “There’s this tradition I call the eudaimonic tradition, from the Greek word for happiness or well-being, eudaimonia. And this is a tradition that runs through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and it runs on through the medieval philosophers and the Scholastics, Aquinas and so forth; in fact it’s the dominant ethical tradition of the first 2,000 years of Western philosophy. It’s not until after the end of the Middle Ages that it begins to be whittled away by new theories. And this is the view according to which there is an ultimate good, which usually gets called “happiness” — but that can be somewhat misleading, because it’s not a pleasant feeling of satisfaction, although it may involve that — but it’s a state of your life objectively going well, your life being an objective success, something like your being successful at living a good human life: that’s what eudaimonia is. That’s the ultimate good.” Roderick T. Long, “Economics and Its Ethical Assumptions,” Mises Daily, May 20 2006. This note is not in my book.