“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Adam Smith’s revolutionary Wealth of Nations has ever since driven our understanding of how individual freedom to pursue self-interest can enhance societal wellbeing. It seems ideal, to those who prize personal liberty, that individuals should have the autonomy and agency to improve their material state of being and aspire to progress. However, it would be a mistake to think that individuals should have absolute freedom-that is, to have ability to do anything to improve their economic situation unrestrained by regulation or socio-moral constraints. Beyond a certain point, the freedom of an individual to pursue their economic interests could trample on the economic conditions of other individuals or even adversely impact their own interests in the long run. Unbridled individual economic freedom may also reshape society and impinge on our shared values in undesirable ways. Some restraint and regulation is therefore necessary.

Theory and evidence support allowing individuals to engage in self-driven free market activity. The failure of totalitarian communist experiments in the Soviet Union, Communist Cambodia, Mao’s China etc. are often cited as salient and painful illustrations of the tragic impact and detrimental inefficiencies centralising economic decision-making to a few powerful elites can bring about. Given that supply and demand are determined by multiple factors and diverse, dynamic individual contexts, the impossibility for any centralised authority to predict and plan production and consumption to adequately fulfil the needs of any sizeable society is now apparent. In contrast, the economic self-determination facilitated by Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ of price mechanisms in capitalist societies has produced significantly better material outcomes in aggregate, as evidenced historically (Lawson, 2008). Why? Friedman (1980; pp. 13) writes: “The key insight of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it…prices that emerged from voluntary transactions between buyers and sellers could coordinate the activity of millions of people, each seeking his own interest, in such a way as to make everyone better off”. The underlying idea that all voluntary trade is necessarily mutually beneficial logically implies that allowing such exchanges via the free market will always improve wellbeing. If we want to maximise material welfare, what grounds are there for economic freedom to be restricted?