The Free Society

On the website of The Free Society, I give a flavour of what’s in The Best Book on the Market:

The emperor Diocletian decreed maximum prices for bread. Bakers couldn’t make a fair return, and stopped baking. The American colonies tried to keep down the price of wheat, which nearly caused George Washington’s army to starve because nobody produced wheat any more.

That’s not ‘market failure’. That’s political failure. Mrs Thatcher was right that “you can’t buck the market”. Markets don’t do what politicians want because markets are human. They are just how human beings rub along together. And humans tend to do what they want, not what their political masters want. Let’s have more markets and fewer politicians, I say.

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• About

  The Best Book on the Market came about because I wanted something that everyone - even politicians - could understand, so I've cut out the jargon and show how markets really work through my own story, and the stories of countless others of people in real-world markets. Because markets are only human. Click to read more...

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