Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets

“Markets do the good things that sound bad; governments do the bad things that sound good.” So begins the audacious argument from New York Times bestselling author Bryan Caplan in his essential treatise on modern economies, Unbeatable. Caplan’s case is not merely ideological: he shows compellingly that markets—by lowering prices, giving consumers what they want, and weighing risks—deliver the raw materials for human prosperity that history tells us are unbeatable by other means. Their more popular alternative, governments, focus on addressing crowd-pleasing complaints, incurring high costs and delivering dubious benefits. With this historical foundation, Caplan makes the case for unabashed support of free markets and fervent opposition to government intervention.

Unbeatable imagines a world where markets are allowed in all the places where we think we don’t want them—schools, immigration, social care, and housing policy—and sketches the positive social and economic transformations that would follow from privatization. These include the miracle effects of giving people money instead of Medicare and Social Security; the ability of open borders to solve demographic and labor problems; and the universal benefits of less regulation. In prose that is uncoded and uncommonly honest, Caplan explains how our aversion to markets emerged from our shared wish to avoid wrestling with tradeoffs—the social desirability bias that leads us to favor bad things that sound good over good things that sound bad. Markets, it turns out, can save us from those disappointments, especially compared to the alternatives. Unlike many free-market economists, Caplan freely concedes the ugly downsides of the policies he favors—but argues that the policies should be evaluated on their overall performance rather than their emotional appeal.

Unbeatable is the maximalist, politically unbeholden case for markets as tools for human flourishing. For readers with open hearts, it offers nothing short of an antidote to our economic discontents.