The system of market economy has never been fully and purely tried. But there prevailed in the orbit of Western civilization since the Middle Ages by and large a general tendency toward the abolition of institutions hindering the operation of the market economy. With the successive progress of this tendency, population figures multiplied and the masses’ standard of living was raised to an unprecedented and hitherto undreamed of level. The average American worker enjoys amenities for which Croesus, Crassus, the Medici, and Louis XIV would have envied him.As the last sentence in the above quotation indicates, Mises utterly rejects the Marxist claim that capitalism is a social system that exists to serve the capitalists. On the contrary, Mises conceived of the market economy as a system in which not the entrepreneurs or capitalists were in charge, but ultimately the consumers. . . .
One of the standard objections to the market economy is that it allegedly allows the wealthy elite to control everyone else. In the Marxist framework, the system is dubbed capitalism since the capitalists control the means of production; they are running the show. In contrast, the hapless workers are “wage slaves” who have the nominal freedom to quit their jobs, yes, but hardly enjoy true freedom since they will starve if they lose their paycheck. Just as the old aristocratic system had been swept aside by the movement for political democracy, the Marxists tried to sell the masses on the idea that socialism represented economic democracy that would complete the emancipation of man.
Mises sought to turn this typical view of the market on its head with his notion of consumer sovereignty. For Mises, the notion that the factory owner or landowner controlled the economy was absurd and reflected a naïve understanding of economics.
—Robert P. Murphy, Choice: Cooperation, Enterprise, and Human Action (Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 2015), e-book.
No comments:
Post a Comment