Posted on 01/16/2009 6:57:12 PM PST by Kaslin
While honoring Martin Luther King, we should recognize that his contribution to free-market prosperity is an important part of his legacy. Through his work to expand freedom, he expanded our market economy's ability to create wealth for all Americans. Market prices communicate information on what people desire most as consumers, and on how they can, as producers, develop and use their talents to best serve consumers. These market prices, and the incentives they provide, are distorted when some are denied opportunities to get a good education, take jobs for which they are qualified, and shop where they choose. Our market economy, with the opportunities and prosperity it provides, depends on freedom. Decentralized Authority Freedom also depends on markets. Freedom is more easily accepted when market prices are motivating people to use their freedom in ways that serve the interests of others. Markets disperse authority, making it less likely that power will become concentrated in the hands of a few elites who can use it to perpetuate their control by suppressing the freedom others. No one argues that the market economy works perfectly, or that it eliminates restrictions on freedom motivated by prejudice. If it did, there would have been no need for the civil rights movement, and few would have heard of Martin Luther King. But freedom is best protected and extended in economies relying on markets. Freedoms taken for granted in market economies are routinely, and often brutally, suppressed in economies relying on state ownership and central planning. How successful would a champion of freedom for an oppressed minority have been in the former Soviet Union or China during the 1950s and 1960s, or be today in North Korea, Cuba, Sudan or Zimbabwe?
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Free market?
º will take care of that.
This title is misleading. King never promoted free markets. In fact he sowed the seeds of socialism, in fact I seemed to remember communists were at big part of his movement(but he wasnt promoting communism). Didnt the civil rights act end up as quotas?
what utter bull
....I was an adult during the King years and he wouldn’t have known diddly about free markets....what he wanted was more government...
They got the FREE part down pat.
btrl
It probably depends somewhat. The King of the 1950s wasn’t necessarily pro- free market but he didn’t push socialism. The King of the late 1960s was an outright socialist.
MTAE (muddled thinkers achieve eminence) in our country thanks to bad public schools.
If MLK and other leaders actually received a solid education which included economic lessons, we would not have to “ponder” what they really believed in, or thought, when it comes to free markets. We’d KNOW.
Because they’re thinking and writing is so unclear, thanks to lack of education, we have to “read the tea leaves,” and attempt to figure out which side they’d come down on, if they’d had a competent, well-rounded education.
Thanks, public schools. Here we are, left “guessing” about what uneducated leaders think & want, for American society...
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