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Economies prosper because of the creativity, dynamism and hard work of the people in them. So ultimately, economies prosper because people are able to put their intelligence and their energy to work to fulfill their own needs and those of others. The most creative entrepreneurs not only meet, but anticipate the needs of other people and thus end up inventing things that didn’t exist before. The system which fosters this is what Adam Smith called the “system of natural liberty” and what today is called free market capitalism.
Free mark capitalism is not so much an ideology as it is simply a doctrine of limitation. It’s a doctrine of letting human creativity go, letting people devise and make and exchange stuff freely, the fundamental premise of which is called the morality of content (or contentment).
If I offer you a job and you freely take it, we’re both better off. I wouldn’t have offered the job and you wouldn’t have taken it if both of us weren’t better off by that transaction. So the corporation, for example, which refuses to hire someone, or the customer who refuses to buy something isn’t doing anyone an injustice. If I refuse to hire you, you’re no worse off than you were before and if you go into a store and you don’t want to buy some things, the store isn’t any worse off than it was before.
So there’s no way, in the structure of natural liberty, for oppression to take place by itself. The system can be distorted and people may work outside the system and call it oppression, but within it, as long as you respect rules of content, it’s a very moral system.
Author, Commentator and President of The King's College, Dinesh D'Souza
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