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Why a free market is superior to democracy
2026-07-15 – JeDI Consulting – reading time 5 minutes
In today’s forms of democracy, the entire economy is regulated through government intervention. Classical socialism is based entirely on this, as history has already clearly shown. But why is there such an obvious determination to cling to democracy and the welfare state?
The first arguments often revolve around who builds our roads, who builds our hospitals, and who takes care of the poor and those in need.
It is constantly claimed that society can only hold together and function through a welfare state. Yet this connection is often not fully thought through.
If we take a closer look at history, one fact becomes clear: Socialism and a planned economy have never, under any circumstances, led to prosperity, peace, fairness, and growth.
The problem lies in standardizing all developments, services, and production without taking the most important factor—quality—into account. An hour of complex and sustained intellectual work is thus supposed to be worth the same as an hour spent watching the oven while baking bread. Worse still, mere presence is considered to be worth as much as the realization of a genuine idea. This is not to say that the baker should be portrayed in a negative light. However, an invention—such as a bicycle—must certainly be evaluated differently in economic (and environmental) terms than the baking of bread, regardless of the time each requires.
At its core, the welfare state promotes complacency, while the free market naturally discourages it. No work, no pay. That not only sounds fair—it is fair.
The argument—“So who builds our roads?”—can be easily answered. A company builds them, and certainly not the state or the government. In the welfare state, however, the contractor is not selected based on economic criteria. This is because the state is not required to act economically (and does not do so). In today’s fiat system, governments have access to compulsory tax revenues and virtually unlimited credit from central banks. Consequently, the best company—one that has established itself in the market through quality—is never selected.
But a free market regulates much more than that. A welfare system is no longer needed if independence and prosperity can develop on their own through free markets. History offers many examples of this. In the 19th century, the free market even produced deflation. Money became increasingly valuable due to technological progress—something that is hard to imagine from today’s perspective. Yet it was precisely during this phase that the world’s most important inventions emerged.
Under Ludwig Erhard in the Federal Republic of Germany, an economic miracle was able to occur in the short term even after World War II. However, other political interests ensured that this remained a one-time occurrence.
Thus, in a free market, there is no need to support the socially disadvantaged. They are so few in number that emergencies can be easily addressed. The free market has a natural interest in a healthy society and thereby prevents major conflicts at their very root.
Wars only benefit governments. No citizen in the world has any interest in spending their own hard-earned money on a war, let alone needlessly risking their life. From the perspective of socialism, however, conflicts are desirable, as they sustain its power. A free market, on the other hand, views wars solely as a senseless waste of resources and human lives.
He therefore views democracy as uneconomical. This is because, today, it implies a welfare state that offers no advantages over the free market in any area of life.