Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 8 of Robert Higgs’s brilliant 1971 book, The Transformation of the American Economy: 1865-1914:

Within a system of private property rights, individuals who own the means of production may sell them or use them as they see fit; similarly, people are free to dispose of their incomes as they please. Fortunately, in such a system it will usually be in the interest of individuals to act in a way that is also socially desirable, because if many people want more of a particular good, their additional expenditures for it will make its production more remunerative, enticing self-interested producers to provide more of it. These producers, in turn, will bid up the prices of resources to attract them away from their present employment and into more valuable uses.

DBx: Yes.

In short, the market process is not, as some people assert, “a drunk donkey.” And nor will its results be improved upon by being overridden by ESG investing or the pursuit of so-called “common-good capitalism”.