INTRODUCING his latest piece on the nightmare of California, Steven Greenhut introduces a Good Little Girl:

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At a conference examining California’s housing crisis, one of the more liberal audience members expressed her frustration at those of us who even talked about free markets... Couldn’t we just get back to discussing government regulations and programs?

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One of my pet prejudices is that women, more than men, actually believe what they are taught in school and by their friends. Men, I feel, are a bit more skeptical. Since we are famously expendable, we at least affect a certain disbelief for the conventional wisdom that might choose to sacrifice us on battlefields to the gods of the ruling class.

Evidently the woman in question is a Good Little Girl that learned to mouth liberal pieties not later than her sojourn in the nunnery of her undergraduate college.

But what she is saying is that voluntary trust and cooperation are for the birds. Only government force and prescription will do. She is calling for the clunking fist. Of course, nobody ever told her that. She has been raised to belief that the application of government to social and economic problems is to correct the vile injustices of the market system.

But markets are about free exchange: governments are force; politics is division; system is domination.

Yeah, and here's a piece that reports that millennials lose a lot of support for the welfare state when they are told how much it costs. No kidding. How could they have got through K-12 without knowing that?

So what are we to say to the Good Little Girl that gets up at a community meeting and says, enough of talking, I call for force!

How about something like this:

Madam, I can't believe you said that! Do you not realize that you are saying that peaceful cooperation cannot work, and that only force gets the job done? You are echoing the cry of every young hunter-gatherer that ever called for a dawn raid on the neighboring village, every Viking that called for a run up a river in England to steal the grain, kill the men, and sell the women and children into slavery. You are echoing the vile dictators of the 20th century, of left and right, that called for the supremacy of the political leader, whether the supremacy of a Stalin, of the Thought of a Mao Zedong, or that Austrian chap. And these men had over 110 million humans killed, not counting war deaths.

Have you not been taught the science? That Marx's economics was exploded back in 1870 with the marginal revolution? That an Austrian Jew predicted, in 1918 less than a year after the Bolshevik revolution that socialism, the ownership of the means of production by the rulers, could not work because it could not compute prices. That another Austrian told us that 10,000 administrative and regulatory bureaucrats could not out-think and out-plan millions of producers and consumers? That an American academic told us that regulation could never work because it would always result in regulatory capture of the regulators by the folks they were supposed to regulate?

In our age we have seen income rise by more than ten times. What has done this? Surely not government, the fount of force, but the unexpected and unsought for inventions of the last 200 years: the textile revolution that brought cheap machine-made clothes to the poor; the steam revolution that brought trans-continental migration to the poor; the medical revolution that brought death-rates for women, and especially women in childbirth, below the death rate for men; the machines that diminished the premium for physical strength and allowed women to participate in the work-for-wages revolution; the contraception revolution that allowed women to control their fertility for the first time ever.

Madam, I beg you, with all my strength, not to pray to government and its God of Force. Have faith instead in your fellow humans, their ability to cooperate, their capacity for trust, their commitment to dealing one-on-one for mutual benefit, provided the rules are set up to reward fair dealing and trust, and above all their commitment to work with each other without invoking the divine intervention of the lightning bolt of government, and its terrible twin, Force.

Have faith in people, not in force.

Link to article

Lefties love to point out the short-comings of capitalism and free-markets, their solution is to toss the baby out with the bathwater, overhaul society and replace it with some level of Marxist-socialism.

When pointing out the short-comings of socialism are more severe and punitive than capitalism not to mention capitalism embraces free-will and choice, pillars of a liberal society, and the leftists eyes glaze-over. They'll eventually blurt-out that X, Y, & Z should be illegal.

And her answer would be, "Huh?"