David Harvey quote on Free Markets

To live under capitalism is to accept or submit to that bundle of rights necessary for endless capital accumulation. 'We seek', says President Bush as he goes to war, 'a just peace where repression, resentment and poverty are replaced with the hope of democracy, development, free markets and free trade.' These last two have, he asserts, 'proved their ability to lift whole societies out of poverty'. The United States will deliver this gift of freedom (of the market) to the world whether it likes it or not. But the inalienable rights of private property and the profit rate (earlier also embedded, at US insistence, in the UN declaration) can have negative, even deadly, consequences.

Free markets are not necessarily fair. 'There is', the old saying goes, 'nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals.' This is what the market does. The rich grow richer and the poor get poorer through the egalitarianism of exchange. No wonder those of wealth and power support such rights. Class divisions widen. Cities become more ghettoized as the rich seal themselves off for protection while the poor become ghettoized by default. And if racial, religious and ethnic divisions cross-cut, as they so often do, with struggles to acquire class and income position, then we quickly find cities divided in the bitter ways we know only too well. Market freedoms inevitably produce monopoly power (as in the media or among developers). Thirty years of neoliberalism teaches us that that the freer the market the greater the inequalities and the greater the monopoly power.

-David Harvey, “The right to the city,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27, 4, 2003, 940.