| richardhutnik said: Economic systems, planned or not, have a way to get people to do things they don't want to do as a career. In a totally free market driven system, a person may want to be an artist, but if the market doesn't care he is an artist (say you are in a world like Idiocracy had where the people watch buttocks on the screen for 2 hours), then the market will say, "You need to find something else to do". The difference is that, in a planned economy there is a said "genius" at top that plans out everything. In an unplanned economy, you run into hiring managers and computer systems that tell you whether or not you get hired and you have to guess what the market wants. Like, golly gee, I would like to make a living creating boardgames. Well, as it is now, you don't make a living creating board games, because the money is too low to do that. To try to pitch the "freedom to choose" as some sort of thing anyone can do, which would fix every ill is to totally misrepresent how markets work. |
Freedom to choose doesn't mean that you're entitled to succeed, naturally, since consumers are also free and will rebuff an artist whose work they dislike or can't relate to. But it does mean that you have the freedom to try your hand at whatever you want, whereas in a planned economy, you simply don't.
By the same token, supporting free markets doesn't necessitate seeing the free market as the cure for all ills. It only requires that a person come to the realization that centrally planned economies always fail spectacularly because it would take a God-like intelligence to manage such things, and of course, no such person exists or ever shall.
