Classical Economist's Considerations to Free Markets Economics Essay

Classical Economist's Considerations to Free Markets
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Classical Economist's Considerations to Free Markets
A free market is a market where the laws of supply, demand, and voluntary exchange are the sole basis for the economic system, without the government's intervention. Different classical economists have different ideas regarding free markets, but they all believed in the sense that each individual should have the right to go after their wealth in their means. The right to possess material welfare is natural since it is not a political privilege or psychological features with which people were born. A free market should be defined by efficiency rather than the ethics or psychology involved. Principles of a free market are not difficult to grasp, and they are even applicable in authoritarian countries to increase consumer satisfaction. Ricardo, Marx, and Mill are some of the classical economists that shared different ideas on free markets.
Ricardo was one of the most influential classical economists during the first half of the nineteenth century. Ricardo's contributions to the ideas of the free-market are some of the essential concepts in economics that have shaped modern economics. Ricardo supported the liberalization of markets and supporting personal liberty, initiatives that made him earn respect from members of the house of Commons (Genetski 2011). He believed that the economy was a complex system of unified mechanisms that relied on each other for efficiency. Ricardo drew inspiration from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which inspired him to write his first article on economics at the age of thirty-seven. He then spent his later life studying and publishing different ideas, including those on a free market.
In terms of free markets, Ricardo argued for the importance of free trade after the government introduced protectionist Corn Laws, which affected importation of wheat into the country. He developed the notion of the comparative cost that gets reflected in the modern world of business through comparative advantage. Ricardo argued that a nation that imports or makes a trade with another country for cheaper products is better compared to producing them at home (Genetski 2011). On the issue of a free market, Ricardo also explained that since farmers were cultivating more land and making it a scarce product, the need to start developing less-fertile land would eventually arise. However, since corn from a productive piece of land had the same price as that from a less productive piece of land, then farmers without land would be willing to pay more for fertile soil, and in turn, the landowners would be the profiteers.
Unlike Ricardo, Marx was one of the most controversial individuals in the field of economics. He condemned the free market and argued that each individual has the creativity to transform the world (Sowell, 2007). However, Ricardo also indicated that the contemporary, sophisticated world is beyond our full control, and therefore, the idea of a free market is not applicable. He believed that the nature of the free market was ungoverned and anarchic. Marx argued that the coordination of market economy through managing the sale and buying of private p...