A free market?

Too Long; Didn't Read

<span>W</span>hat is a free market? To answer this question we must first examine what trade is. Trade is, at its core, the exchange of one good for another. In order for the exchange to take place at all both parties need to benefit from it somehow. In theory, a free market should therefore benefit everyone participating in it. In a market, different goods compete in both price and quality to best suit the buyers needs while still creating a profit for the seller. There’s really nothing more to it than that. Human minds, however, have traits less admirable than desires to participate in mutually beneficial relationships. Envy, for instance, plays a large role in how we view other peoples interactions and, in turn, how we interact with each other. A desire for equality, however you might define the term, seems to be something we’re all born with. Many seem to think that their standards of living can only be measured in terms of how they differ from the standards of other people, in other words in <em>relative </em>terms. If you look at standards of living over time instead, almost everyone on the planet is enjoying a higher standard than their parents or, even more certainly, their grandparents did. This makes us biased. There’s an estimate stating that some eighty people own half of the earth’s resources but there’s little evidence to suggest that the other seven billion of us are fairing ill because of this. In fact, the opposite is more in line with reality. Globalization has made a select few extremely wealthy but at the same time it has also almost completely eradicated poverty from the face of the earth.