Personal Market

The Market: This Time It’s Personal:

Economics teaches us of the virtues of the impersonal market. Indeed, if we had to know everyone who helped to make our daily bread before we could eat it, we’d all go hungry. But at the same time, when we turn our attention from the marvelous operation of the economic system as a whole toward human action at the “micro” level, another virtue of the free market comes into view in the way it lets us create and destroy social ties. Without that ability, extensive voluntary trade would not be possible either.

At the macro level, which encompasses the entire production process of a pencil (or of green onions), markets are highly impersonal. But at each of the myriad stages of that highly complex process, between for example the buyers and sellers of the cedar or rapeseed or raw carbon, is a relationship that is necessarily personal to one degree or another.

.. True liberty means not only being able to form ties with new people and new social networks, however, but also the freedom to cut ties to old business partners and customers, as well as to let go of old social networks, including those of friends, family, and community.

The ability to form and dissolve ties to social networks gives greater access to an existing array of diverse knowledge and tastes – much of which may not be useful but some of which undoubtedly is – while expanding the range of that diversity by stimulating new ideas in business, science, and culture. Liberty encourages economic progress and social diversity ..