Читать книгу Classical Economic Principles & the Wealth of Nations - Michael Ashley - Страница 8

The principal alternative to a free market system involves government officials substituting their judgment for the free market price or quantity of various items. These officials would have to decide whether a price should be higher or lower than the market price, or whether more or less of some particular product or resource should be used.

In doing so, officials replace the unique collective preferences of all individuals with either their own preferences or the preferences of those who lobby for such changes. The end result rewards some and penalizes others based on the opinions of certain select individuals.

Altering the free market price of any resource reverberates through the economy affecting countless other prices. By distorting the entire system of prices, such decisions tend to produce an inefficient use of resources.

Once we grasp the complexity of the market system, it becomes readily apparent that no authority is capable of understanding the system. No authority could conceivably possess even a small fraction of the information necessary to make the type of decisions that are made unconsciously by those responding to market forces. Hence, no authority can be capable of making the type of choices necessary for generating and sustaining wealth. Adam Smith put it this way:

The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.²

In a free market system government has a specific and important role to play. That role is the topic of Chapter 8. For now, it’s important to understand that when government officials impose their preferences over those of the market, they curtail individual freedom. And in the process, they distort the information necessary to provide for the efficient use of resources.

It is for all these reasons that early classical economists believed that giving individuals more freedom to respond to free market forces would tend to promote the wealth of nations.