How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

by Ben Shapiro

This is patently erroneous on nearly every level. We cannot “make the market work for us” any more than we can “make free speech work for us.” Both already work for us, because neither invades our rights; the greatest guarantee that free speech, like free markets, is an asset is to live virtuously and urge others to do so as well. Carlson’s key error—the belief that there is a collective “we” damaged by the free market—is obvious. We can redistribute the benefits of the market for some, destroying those benefits for others. Every interference in the market represents a trade-off. That trade-off may occasionally be worthwhile. But trusting an elite caste to determine which groups ought to benefit at the expense of other groups cuts directly against a rights-based society—and in the end, against both individuals and the success of the nation. Markets are natural outgrowths of human nature, and natural rights. You own yourself, and you own your labor—and no one has the right to remove that labor from you for the good of the collective without just compensation. The success of free markets rests precisely on the fact that it reflects truths about human nature: about our desire to create, to acquire, to own, to control the environment around us. As with other utopian schemes, the desire to change human nature by overthrowing individual rights is doomed to both failure and oppression.