What Is a Free Market? Romney Gets It Wrong

Does Mitt Romney even know what a free market is?

It’s worth asking, if only because people watching him debate last night, and incorrectly assuming that a successful businessman must know such basic facts, may have been misled.

I quote:

Regulation is essential. You can't have a free market work if you don't have regulation. As a businessperson, I had to have -- I need to know the regulations. I needed them there. You couldn't have people opening up banks in their -- in their garage and making loans.

A free market is precisely a market in which people can open up banks in their garages, crumbling apartments, and back pockets—or their stores, factories, and mansions—and make loans without getting the government’s permission and without government telling them which loans to make . It’s a market in which people with goods to sell need willing customers, not willing bureaucrats . It’s a market in which the government’s job is to secure your rights, not to make regulations that substitute its business judgment for yours, that force you to help your competitors , and that sacrifice your values to goals that are not your own . It’s a market where the sort of businessmen who need those kinds of regulations fail—but businessmen who start out in garages with products that people are willing to pay for, who need no laws except those securing everyone’s rights, can become spectacularly rich by enriching their employees and customers.

It’s a market that’s free—that is, a market in which you are free: free to live by your own judgment, offering the products and services you see fit to customers or employers who see fit to pay you for them. You need this freedom because you need to figure out for yourself how best to live your life—not only in your most intimate affairs, but in your productive work and in your choice of goods and services to buy. In every aspect of your life, you need to identify your values and pursue them. And that—not, as Romney suggested, being helped if you’re “less fortunate” —is what the right to the pursuit of happiness is all about.

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