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Failure to understand the enormous self-regulating complexity of the market – and how it engenders efficiency, ingenuity and innovation, as well as facilitating benevolence — stands behind glib assumptions that all that is required for a better world is just to “change the darn thing.”

Just as Mr. Suzuki has no understanding of economics, he appears to have no interest in economic history. If he did, he might record that the most murderous regimes of the past hundred years – that is, Communism and fascism – have been based on the alleged shortcomings of free markets, and freedom more generally.

Again, the notion that those who have some appreciation of the workings and results of free markets are blinkered fundamentalists worshipping at the shrine of the Invisible Hand is bunkum. Who are these people? Let Mr. Suzuki name a few. They are in fact demonic figments of his distinctly limited imagination.

Where ardent fans of free markets may err is in imagining that they might reason their opponents into agreement. However, people like Mr. Suzuki are as impervious to reason as they are blind to evidence.

Environmental alarmism has been eagerly embraced in the wake of the fall of Communism because it offers a last refuge for those whose reflexive hatred for capitalism is based on misunderstanding and moral condemnation of a system that fails to accommodate their own naïve and assuredly disastrous plans for reordering society.

Mr. Suzuki, significantly, is a fan of benighted economies such as those of Cuba, Bolivia and Ecuador, which are not merely poor but, hardly by coincidence, abusers of human rights.

What is – or should be – astonishing is not merely that we fail to understand and appreciate the workings and results of relatively free markets, but that we are inclined to trust and admire those who pour scorn on them.

Peter Foster’s latest book,Why We Bite the Invisible Hand: The Psychology of Anti-Capitalism, is available from Amazon.com.