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| Barack Obama's shoes | |  |
A sign of a hard-worker, a nervous pacer, or just a favorite pair. Who knows, but the President is not immune to the effects of abrasion on leather and rubber. | Photo: Archives |
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This election year, the Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates will be spewing the virtues of our free market to the ignorant masses; they'll promise how their plans to dictate, I mean legislate, will help strengthen our free market economy out of the dark hole it somehow plunged itself into.
Before we go any further, for the sake of clarity, let's first examine what a free market is; which in its basic form, is a voluntary exchange between two privately owned parties, where supply and demand set price point, and is mostly, if not entirely, absent of government intrusion, but --
Things become skewed instantly, as there are many forms of a "free market", and depending on viewpoint, your free market and my free market may be two completely different things. In fact, your free market may not be free at all.
For example, anyone who seeks a Laissez-faire free market will have a much different viewpoint than someone who seeks a Socialist market economy, or some seeking a Mutualism free market.
I myself prefer a Socialist Free Market, which is not a Socialist Market or a Social free market, but something entirely different, confusing right? My Socialist Free Market is firmly based on voluntary exchange, where cooperatives own the means of production through a self-owned labor force, not to be confused with state-socialism or central planning or Communis
| Your free market and my free market may be two completely different things. | | |
m; this is not publicly owned enterprises, or monopolies, nor is there a need for state-run central planners, artificially setting price points and manipulating interest rates.
As you can see, twisting what a free market is and is not, is entirely dependent on your personal viewpoint. Worse yet, voting in a politician to represent you, who has a totally different viewpoint of what a free market is, can and probably will cost you thousands of dollars over their reign in office.
Our current economic system is an abomination of what a true free market should be, prices are not controlled by supply and demand, nor is it void of the government's hand, and in fact, government has a heavy hand in almost all business sectors.
This kind of "free market" is what most mainstream Democrats and Republicans believe in, and legislates towards, the proof is indisputable. Both Democratic and Republican led administrations have equally infiltrated our markets, restraining them to the point of collapse, and both parties fight against true free market initiatives on a daily basis.
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Their "free market" sustains itself by legislating competition out through corporate-captured regulators. Their "free market" sets an insidious minimum wage to legalize the coercive plundering of your labor. Their "free market" sustains itself by robbing the wealth of our populace, forcing us to sustain big government's whims through coercive taxation. Their "free market" sustains itself by involving the government to capture or rescue "private" entities, that skew free and open markets. Their "free market" relies on corporate welfare, instead of supply and demand to reflect true price points, and to earn profits. Their "free market" will enslave you through debt-servitude, and take away your choices.
For the 83% of workers who make less than $100,000 a year, if you do choose to vote for a Democratic or Republican candidate, to not research which free market they believe in, could be financially disastrous for you and your community – vote wisely.
