By John Swingle

Free-market economics operates in the real world and affects people in a real way, George Mason University's Economics Department chairman Donald Boudreaux told the audience at Accuracy In Academia's Conservative University conference last summer.

Boudreaux said we are surrounded by "unambiguous testaments to the power of the free market, so incredible, so everyday that we don't notice them." Boudreaux informed the attendees at Georgetown University that the mere fact of their presence there qualified them as being among the "point-zero-zero zero-zero-one percent of the wealthiest people who ever lived."

Many environmentalists would have us believe that free markets have "the world teetering on the edge of catastrophe." Instead, Boudreaux noted improving trends in Western industrialized societies water, land, and air pollution. "Capitalism is the greatest cleanser of the environment ever known," Boudreaux says.

Almost as timeless as the free market itself are Frederic Bastiat's (1801-1850) classical economic ideas, Boudreaux argues. At the 200th anniversary celebration of Bastiat's birth in Mugron, France a group of "loud, very rude, professional protestors from the anti-globalization crowd" chanted "taxe Tobin maintenan" [Tobin tax now], Boudreaux remembered.

Boudreaux suggested that the irony would not have been lost on Bastiat. Tobin, Boudreaux remarked, is a "tax scheme wherein governments can penalize foreign investors who try to remove capital from a country if they haven't been there for a minimum amount of time." The intention is that investors will then be less inclined to withdraw funds from a country that's experiencing some sort of 'instability.'

Echoing a common Bastiat theme Boudreaux explained, "That is what is seen. What is not seen is that if you impose a Tobin tax," what's going to happen to investors' willingness to fund foreign companies? "If you make the exit of investment more costly you'll make investors less willing to enter" in the first place.

Boudreaux reviewed the hardships of pre-industrial life, challenging the romanticized (and sanitized) picture that's often presented of those "simpler times." Boudreaux noted for example that the chances of a woman dying in childbirth used to be one in five. A woman today has a statistically greater chance of being killed in an accident on the way to the hospital than she does of dying during delivery. Additionally, infant mortality was dramatically higher and life expectancy was significantly lower before the Industrial Revolution.

Quite simply, Boudreaux said, people in market-oriented societies are living longer, healthier, happier lives and have more leisure time than ever before.