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We’ve Got 99 Problems and Sound Money Ain’t One

One of the great social, political fallacies of the day is found in the unexamined and nearly unconscious belief that all expressed human demands ought to be realized through the market, that money ought to match everywhere with everything that one could possibly desire. 



The popular refrain on this matter follows from the unstated supposition that the market, an abstract and unidentifiable entity representative of innumerable moving parts and human participants, bears certain responsibilities for others who wish to benefit from its activities, even after those individuals have personally failed to contribute anything of their own to that mechanism. 

Unwittingly, those critics assume those other individuals ought to relinquish their freedom of discretion, or some margin of the product of their labor, to satisfy the requests of the specified few who have done little more than to exercise their mouths in communicating their selfish wants. 

The cohorts of people who identify with this camp, known colloquially as anti-capitalists or more precisely as free-loaders, tacitly imply that the market was born out of decree, to acquiesce to the commands of consumers, or to singlehandedly support the lives of the world. 

The factor of freedom seems everywhere to elude the champions of these ideals. 

On the contrary, a great number of these demands happen to be satisfied only incidentally by the volition and capacity of individuals and their personal property, where any so-called shortage represents a lack of capital, production or desire from those who own those factors. 

In total, a dearth of available options at a given price level represents not a categorical underpayment of labor or underproduction by specific suppliers, but rather an insufficiency of incentive for the producer or that of production by those who have expressed desire for the given good. 

In a sense, then, it is the consumer’s inadequate marginal productivity, or his own mismanagement of resources, which is responsible for the shortfall, not the deficiency of business or the failure of the monetary system.

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