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the market, they are subject to the sovereignty of the latter. A capitalist or entrepreneur who acts strictly as a consumer and ignores market demand altogether will cease to be a capitalist or entrepreneur.

Economist Murray Rothbard, a student of Mises, raised objections to the Misesian idea of consumer sovereignty. According to Rothbard, "sovereignty" is necessarily a political term, describing the exertion of compulsory force by one party against another. On a free market, nobody has the power to coerce anybody else; all are barred from initiating force. The consumers thus cannot dictate what any producer will make with that producer's own property. Rather, the consumers can only indirectly influence the producer by indicating their demand to that him. If the producer wishes to earn a profit, he would do well to respond to the signals the consumers give him. However, both consumers and producers are always sovereign; they maintain an individual self-sovereignty. The producer is always entitled to exercise his property rights and reject the fulfillment of a certain consumer demand. He might thereby lose monetarily, but that is his prerogative. He might, on the other hand, get away with acting partly as a consumer himself, as in the case of the employer who hires his less productive relative, provided that he earns enough revenue to stay in business.

Furthermore, Rothbard thought that Mises's comparison of the market to a democratic process was unfair to the free market. Compared to the free market, democracy entails immense constraints on individual choice. The individual is entitled to only select between a small number of options decided upon by someone else (the political parties, the legislators, or the voters in primaries). Moreover, in a democracy, the majority decision is binding on all, even those who did not personally support it. The candidate elected by 51% of the people will be the officeholder for 100% of the people.

The market, on the other hand, offers neither a dearth of choices nor any compulsion to accept the will of the majority. I, as a consumer, might loathe rap music even though the majority of other consumers in my vicinity might demand it highly. Instead, I seek to obtain immense quantities of classical recordings for my consumption. Producers will take into account both my tastes and the tastes of the majority in creating their products: they will cater to both the market niche that demands rap music and the smaller market niche that

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