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test is the best way to determine what should be produced and how it should be distributed.

In order to pursue profit, man needs to be free to do so. He needs to depend on his own rational judgment in deciding what is profitable to him and in determining how to pursue it. If somebody else restricts him from following his best judgment or imposes an unprofitable course of action upon him, then the individual cannot act in his best interests or flourish maximally. The only political, social, and economic system which allows individuals to flourish freely is laissez-faire capitalism, which tolerates no coercive restraints on voluntary, non-coercive, individual profit-seeking activities. Under laissez-faire capitalism, every man has sovereignty to decide the value he will assign to each type of profit, the ways in which he will pursue this profit, and the types of exchanges he will make with other consenting individuals in order to flourish.

If compulsory economic regulations prevent the individual from seeking his own flourishing in his own way, this will also damage other people; the market errors that entrepreneurial activity might have corrected will remain and continue to result in misallocated resources. Numerous mutually beneficial value-trades will be obstructed. Most tragically, individuals will be stunted in their self-improvement and flourishing by restrictions on certain activitiesespecially money-making. They will instead suffer great losses through the diversion of resources to sustain an inefficient and harmful regulatory regime.

If human flourishing is moralif the improvement of individual lives is moralthan so is the pursuit of profit. If the pursuit of profit is moral, then men should be free to pursue it. This reasoning leads us to favor maximal economic liberty under laissez-faire capitalism.

Learn more about this author, G. Stolyarov II.
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