Quotation of the day on how the free market is intimately personal and the government is impersonal and dictatorial

From Mark Perry of "Carpe Diem."

"…. from Leonard Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education (one of the oldest free-market organization in the US), writing in 1971 in his essay “Leave it to the Market” (emphasis added):

The market, if free, is intimately personal; it renders justice in the only sensible definition of that term; it continuously and automatically moves ever-changing satisfactions and ever-changing aspirations – supply and demand of particular goods and services – toward a harmony one with the other; it is humane to the extent of the human kindness that is within us. 

The alternative to the free market is the rigged, planned, dictatorial, coercive, interventionist, authoritarian market, variously known as the planned economy, the welfare state, omnipotent government . . . As contrasted with the free market, this is definitely disruptive and antisocial; it is forever and of necessity forcing ever-changing satisfactions and ever changing aspirations towards a state of disharmony one with the other—shortages of this, surpluses of that and so on; it stifles and eventually kills human kindness. 

The free market is intimately personal . . . each person deciding for himself what to produce, where to work, what to buy and sell, and what are to be acceptable terms of exchange. I, who know more about me than anyone else, am in charge of me! How can a way of life possibly be more intimately personal than each individual his own decision-maker? 

In the alternative situation, a bureaucrat presides over these decisions … He cannot know, only guess, what may be your countless and ever-changing preferences or what constitutes your idea of welfare. Someone who knows nothing of you and me in charge of you and me. Dictatorial to the core!

MP: The last paragraph reminds me of something I once heard Walter E. Williams say, “Socialism only works if you know everybody’s name,” implying that central planning, income redistribution, and a welfare-type system with a social safety net might have a chance to work well within a family when you know everybody intimately and personally, but fails when it’s applied impersonally to a large group of people, i.e. society at large."