Importance of the Free Market

Since the Modern Age, an idea that has marked societies around the world in a great way begins to be defined: we are talking about the idea of ​​a free market, of a trade free and of an economy determined by the same economic action. Although the concept is considered to be born with the British thinker Adam Smith, it was consolidated towards the 19th century as one of the most significant political and economic ideologies.

Mercantilism as the predecessor of the free market and its economic proposal

In seventeenth-century France, the idea arose that the wealth of nations was the possibility that each country had of get rich based on buying and selling different types of products, especially precious metals such as gold and silver. This type of ideology economy occurred within the framework of the massive exploitation of the American colonies and served as the basis for establishing an ideology in which free trade was necessary for each country to become a power vigorous.

Later, near the end of the 18th century, Adam Smith published his text "The Wealth of Nations" in which he rightly pointed out the importance for a sovereign territory to have a dynamic economy that could impose itself on the others and that basically depended on the regulation of the market. The free market then assumes that a government should not intervene in economic decisions since they should be left to the movements of the international market.

The consolidation of a bourgeois idea that exists to this day

There is no doubt that the historic event that just catapulted the free market concept to success was the French Revolution, also understood as the bourgeois revolution. It defended (in addition to freedom and other rights) the private property as a symbol of a society vigorous. Thus, in the 19th century, the countries of Western Europe and the United States began to conquer the planet establishing a complex but well-oiled commercial circuit in which the free market was essential.

The importance of this type of economic ideology had to do with the defense of what was understood as a necessity or even a basic right: the possibility of enriching oneself. individually without collective or superior forces to the individual (the State for example) could intervene controlling, imposing regulations, forcing to pay taxes or rates etc

Images: Fotolia. absent84 – rms164