«Liberté! Sauvons la liberté! La liberté sauvera le reste!» Victor Hugo.

16/10/2007

Por quê o mercado?

Freedom, as people enjoyed it in the democratic countries of Western civilization in the years of the old liberalism’s triumph, was not a product of constitutions, bills of rights, laws, and statutes. Those documents aimed only at safeguarding liberty and freedom, firmly established by the operation of the market economy, against encroachments on the part of office holders. No government and no civil law can guarantee and bring about freedom otherwise than by supporting and defending the fundamental institutions of the market economy... Where there is no market economy, the best-intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.

# Ludwid von Mises, Human Action, p. 283.