The point is not whether the market provides the best, most efficient, most waste-free, or the healthiest products. It never was. The point is that a free market in a free society provides what people want, without force, by free trade between productive individuals. A free market is the result of a free society, not the cause.

Generally, this still gives almost everyone what they need for the best price, and without a gun to their heads, which is why you don't see people swimming in inner tubes to get from Florida to Cuba. Go to a Safeway store, and wander the aisles a while. If this doesn't get a certain message across about freedom and choice, I'm not sure where to go from there.

This idea irritates the living hell out of collectivists who are convinced that the average dumb human being has to be hammerlocked into doing the right thing for themselves and others, but there it is. To them, all of human existence falls under the category of "second hand smoke," and they have the right to tell you how to live. What's really funny is liberals are constantly vigilant about some conservative making it hard to buy Trojans, but sit quietly while leftists try to control almost every other aspect of how they live. Go here for a good, long look at this kind of thinking. If they had their way, there'd be a bureacracy and enforcement police to make sure you got enough fiber in your diet.

Yeah, a free society will eat too much fat, go to the wrong movies, drive one to a car (a BIG car), smoke cigarettes, watch junk on TV, read books by Stephen King instead of Chomsky, use an electric toothbrush, and tell the nannies to bugger off. Also they tend to vote in ways other than what the elite knows is best for them. Tough.

My favorite quote from "Demolition Man," in which everyone lives in a future that's a nanny state wet dream. A rebel in hiding is speaking (played by the superb Denis Leary):

You see, according to Cocteau's plan, I'm the enemy because I like to think. I like to read, I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind of guy that could sit in a greasy spoon and wonder gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecue ribs or the side order of gravy fries. I want high cholesterol. I would eat bacon and butter and buckets of cheese.

OK. I want to smoke Cuban cigars the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green Jell-O all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why, because I might suddenly feel the need to. OK? Pal, I've seen the future. Know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his pajamas, sipping a banana-broccoli shake, singing 'I'm the Oscar Meyer wiener'. You live up top, you live how he wants. Your other choice: come down here and maybe starve to death.