Marketism/beliefs

Core free-marketist beliefs include:

• Governments must do bad things constantly in order to be a government.
  • "They use this monopoly to assault, rob, kidnap, and murder. They can and indeed must do these things simply to exist."
  • Therefore governments are bad.
• A government is a group of people who claim a monopoly on the initiation of force in a given geographical area.
• Only virtue leads to success; success (i.e. making money) is therefore, by definition, virtuous. (see fairness fallacy)
  • Therefore: Anyone who is rich deserves every penny of their wealth.
    • Therefore: Anything which interferes -- or appears to be interfering -- with market forces is a source of injustice (i.e. moving rewards from those who deserve them to those who do not)
      • Therefore: Government interference with the market is evil.
        • Therefore: Government regulation is evil, regardless of the evil said regulation may be trying to prevent.
• Physical coercion is always wrong.
  • "The initiation of force, threat of force, or fraud used against the life, liberty, or property of another is wrong."
• The results of failing to coerce, however, are of no moral consequence.
• All rights are individual; groups do not have any rights.
• All valid social obligations are negative; there are no positive obligations to society.
• Only government regulation can cause monopolies.
  • More generally, excessive private power only exists because it is able to exploit excessive government power.
    • Implication: all excessive power is created by government.
• It is the government's fault that its regulatory power is abused [W] by powerful interests. (If that power didn't exist, then it couldn't be abused.)
• All people have a right to property.
  • That includes guns.
• All modern laws and regulations are enforced through violence or threat of violence.
  • Using coercion (violence or threat of violence) against another human being is a violation of human rights.
  • All modern laws therefore inherently violate human rights.
• Government doesn't grant rights.
• All people are born with the same rights (called "natural rights").
• The US Constitution and Bill of Rights merely acknowledges these natural rights; it does not define them.
• If you're willing to support state coercion against those who break rules that don't infringe on natural rights (as given in the Constitution), then you can't claim to be moral, just, or a supporter of human rights.
• If rights came from other people (rather than being innate), then those same people could take them away (and make you a slave).
  • ...and they would be justified in doing so.
    • Implication: If someone gives you something, they are justified in taking it back later.
• If you don't believe in natural rights, then you don't believe all people were created equal.
  • (There is some ambiguity about what is meant by "equal": 1. People are all the same in some essential way -- all equally capable of making good decisions, for example; 2. People should all be equal before the law -- the law should not treat one person differently than another because of some arbitrary attribute that person has (race, sexual orientation, wealth, etc.), but at one point it was explained as meaning that they all have the same natural rights.)

Some free-marketeers [Who?] also express the belief that there is no such thing as society (after Margaret Thatcher's famous statement to this effect) as a way of attacking the concept of (positive) social obligation, but apparently not all of them agree with this.

There is also commonly an expressed belief that reward is proportional to effort, and that hard work will pay off.