Concept
Economic freedom
Overview
Economic freedom, or economic liberty, is the agency of people to make economic decisions. This is a term used in economic and policy debates as well as in the philosophy of economics. One approach to economic freedom comes from the liberal tradition emphasizing free markets, free trade, and private property. Another approach to economic freedom extends the welfare economics study of individual choice, with greater economic freedom coming from a larger set of possible choices. Other conceptions of economic freedom include freedom from want and the freedom to engage in collective bargaining.
The liberal free-market viewpoint defines economic liberty as the freedom to produce, trade and consume any goods and services acquired without the use of force, fraud, theft or government regulation. This is embodied in the rule of law, property rights and freedom of contract, and characterized by external and internal openness of the markets, the protection of property rights and freedom of economic initiative. There are several indices of economic freedom that attempt to measure free market economic freedom. Based on these rankings, correlative studies have found higher economic growth to be correlated with higher scores on the country rankings. Critics of this approach, such as Fredrik Carlsson and Susanna Lundström, have argued that the economic freedom indices conflate unrelated policies and policy outcomes in order to conceal negative correlations between economic growth and free-market policies, such as counting lower corruption as an indicator of economic freedom.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Hence it neglected the necessity of studying and regulating industrial conditions so that a nominal freedom can be made an actuality. Find a man who believes that all men need is freedom _from_ oppressive legal and political measures, and you have found a man who, unless he is merely obstinately maintaining his own private privileges, carries at the back of his head some heritage of the metaphysical doctrine of…
John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct
States what Economic freedom is.
In what is termed politics, democratic social organization makes provision for this direct participation in control: in the economic region, control remains external and autocratic. Hence the split between inner mental action and outer physical action of which the traditional distinction between the liberal and the utilitarian is the reflex. An education which should unify the disposition of the members of society…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
States what Economic freedom is.
If, therefore, Political Economy be a science, it cannot be a collection of practical rules; though, unless it be altogether a useless science, practical rules must be capable of being founded upon it. The science of mechanics, a branch of natural philosophy, lays down the laws of motion, and the properties of what are called the mechanical powers. The art of practical mechanics teaches how we may avail ourselves of…
John Stuart Mill, Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy
States what Economic freedom is.
Related ideas
- Austrian school of economics
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Political freedom
- Friedrich Hayek
- Free market
- Ethics (journal)
- Anarchism
- Harvard University Press
- Hong Kong
- Springer Science+Business Media
- Intellectual property
- Private property
- Isaiah Berlin
- Trade union
- Marxism
- New Deal
- Milton Friedman
- Socialism
- Singapore
- PBS
- Empirical evidence
- United States
- Civil liberties
- Welfare economics
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Liberalism.