Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

… is from page 139 of the late Nobel laureate Douglass North‘s 2005 book, Understanding the Process of Economic Change:

This liberty to come and go, to buy and sell as they saw fit was as essential to economic growth as some security of property.

DBx: Economic prosperity for the masses requires security of private property rights. Of course it does. But such prosperity requires also the freedom of people – as consumers, as producers, and simply as human beings – from being bound against their will to existing arrangements and places. And this prosperity further requires a widespread acceptance of what Deirdre McCloskey and Art Carden call “the bourgeois deal.“