It's easy to worry about the future, and fret that prosperity can't continue unabated. Consider Odessa - once a galloping free port providing riches and culture for it's inhabitants, then burdoned by the bust of the shipping trade, falling into decline. It's easy to assume that capitalism breeds a cyclical passage.
It's also cheap to form the opinion that as we've passed from agricultural, to industrial, to service based economy's there's nowhere else to go, and developing lands like India and China will "steel all our jobs". And although this belief is dispicable, there's even non-racists who believe it, so the debate must be engaged in.
Most shipping ports lived well past their sell by date as a result of labour unions securing heavy government subsidy. In this instance, the market is not to blame. The cyclical "boom-bust" is merely a creative destruction, moving resources to higher valued uses. This undeniably benefits the economy over any reasonable time period, and over a medium term will benefit even those who've lost jobs. For those who worry where extra jobs will come from, free-market economist's like to point out the industries being created every day, the one's unimaginable to those without faith in free men.
But we must be careful to talk about constraints. To say that markets are good, and markets are everywhere is not enough - since many people, quite rightly, disagree. Some scenarios will prosper without markets - those that have alternative means of allocating resources - and we can welcome them. The family, for example, is an economic organisation. And while some good occurs outside of markets, not all markets are welcome. For example no economist should endorse the Dutch prison swap market since it violates contracts.
Markets aren't everywhere, and they're not always welcome. In their place, however - and that place is a regime of private property rights, freedom of exchange, etc - markets will provide an extraordinary and beautiful service in facilitating the lives of us all.
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