All Markets Are Sharing Economies
3rd December 2018
Don Boudreaux preaches the libertarian economic gospel.
Genuine sharing through political institutions can, of course, be imagined. And such sharing does exist in some actual settings, as when citizens of a small town literally have a town hall meeting and reach a consensus to combine their efforts and resources to build a community playground. Yet in reality, most of what government promotes is taking rather than sharing.
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As distorted as is the perception that politics is an arena that encourages and enables sharing, even more distorted is the perception that the market is an arena that discourages and prevents sharing. Long before the arrival of what we today call the “sharing economy,” the market has been, and continues to be, history’s most potent and skilled driver of sharing.
Markets let each person do it his way. Governments force people to do it their way. That’s the bottom line.