Adam Smith
Smith understood markets as social instruments that only work under specific conditions. Competition, transparency, and the ability to refuse bad terms were assumed—not guaranteed. He warned that landlords and monopolists could extract value without creating it, and that when one side of a market lacks real alternatives, price ceases to be a signal of value. Smith’s market is not self-justifying; it is conditional. NEWFREEMARKET aligns with this premise by restoring the conditions Smith relied on—exit, competition, and circulation—where they have quietly collapsed.
Aristotle
Aristotle treated economics as a means, not an end. Wealth, exchange, and property existed to support a flourishing life (eudaimonia), not to accumulate without limit. He warned that when acquisition detaches from use, it becomes corrosive—undermining civic stability and human purpose. In modern terms: when essentials like shelter are optimized for extraction rather than function, the system violates its own telos. NEWFREEMARKET inherits this insight by re-centering markets on capacity, use, and circulation—so accumulation serves life, not the reverse.
Douglass North
North showed that outcomes are not driven primarily by intentions or talent, but by institutions—the formal and informal rules that shape incentives over time. When institutions reward extraction, rational actors extract; when they reward production and exchange, markets grow resilient. Crucially, North emphasized path dependence: once bad rules lock in, societies can remain trapped even when everyone sees the damage. NEWFREEMARKET sits squarely in this tradition—treating housing failure not as a moral lapse, but as an institutional misalignment that must be redesigned at the rule level.
Amartya Sen
Sen reframed freedom away from slogans and toward capability. What matters is not whether rights exist on paper, but whether people actually possess the material and social conditions to exercise choice, refuse harm, and pursue alternatives. Poverty, in his framework, is not merely low income—it is constrained agency. Markets that formally allow participation but practically deny exit are therefore unfree, regardless of ideology. NEWFREEMARKET mirrors this logic by judging markets on what they enable people to do, not what they claim to permit.
Ibn Khaldun
Centuries before modern economics, Ibn Khaldun described how civilizations rise through cohesion and fall through extraction. He observed that when ruling classes grow accustomed to unearned rents, they increase burdens on productive people, hollowing out the very base that sustains them. Over time, initiative fades, risk-taking declines, and decline becomes inevitable—not because of moral failure, but because incentives have been inverted. NEWFREEMARKET reflects this long-cycle insight: systems that reward extraction over contribution inevitably consume their own foundations.
Hannah Arendt
Arendt distinguished between survival and freedom. A society may keep people alive while quietly stripping them of the capacity to act—to begin something new, to take risks, to appear in the world as agents rather than managed lives. Domination, in her analysis, rarely announces itself; it normalizes. When futures are already spoken for, action collapses into compliance. NEWFREEMARKET aligns with this warning: markets that deny exit do not merely misprice goods—they suppress human agency at the structural level.
Henry George
George identified land as a uniquely dangerous asset when left unchecked: fixed in supply, essential to life, and capable of generating returns without corresponding productivity. He showed how rising land values enrich owners while silently taxing labor, enterprise, and mobility. This dynamic concentrates wealth not through innovation, but through exclusion. While George proposed a single-tax remedy, his deeper contribution was diagnostic—revealing how rent extraction distorts markets over time. NEWFREEMARKET generalizes this insight by targeting scarcity capture rather than ownership itself, restoring circulation without freezing development.
Karl Polanyi
Polanyi showed that markets collapse when they are allowed to govern things that people cannot opt out of. Land, labor, and money, he argued, are not true commodities—because human beings cannot meaningfully withdraw from them without severe harm. When these domains are treated as self-regulating markets, society is forced to defend itself, often through crisis, backlash, or authoritarian correction. Polanyi’s insight is not anti-market; it is anti-fiction. NEWFREEMARKET extends this logic by distinguishing between voluntary arenas that can remain free and forced arenas that require guardrails to prevent social self-destruction.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Machiavelli argued that meaningful change requires aiming beyond what seems immediately attainable. Using the metaphor of the archer, he observed that those who aim higher than their target—guided by the example of great builders before them—may fall short, but will still land closer to the necessary mark than those who aim only for what feels probable or comfortable. His point was not optimism, but discipline: ambition must be set above present constraints if structural improvement is to occur at all. NEWFREEMARKET adopts this posture—designing not for the median outcome of current incentives, but for the conditions required to reach a more functional equilibrium.
Jane Jacobs
Jacobs understood cities as living systems governed by circulation, not scale alone. Prosperity emerges when people, capital, ideas, and opportunity move freely through neighborhoods—when entry and exit are constant and adaptation is possible. She warned that consolidation, over-centralization, and single-use optimization freeze this movement and quietly kill urban life. Housing, in her view, is the platform on which everything else depends. NEWFREEMARKET extends her logic beyond the street and the block: when shelter ceases to circulate, every downstream market inherits rigidity.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Tocqueville warned that democracy does not collapse only through force; it erodes through dependency. When citizens lose material independence, they lose the habits of initiative, association, and risk-taking that freedom requires. Power centralizes quietly—not because people are oppressed, but because exit becomes impractical. For Tocqueville, broad ownership and mobility were not luxuries; they were civic infrastructure. NEWFREEMARKET reflects this insight by treating housing not as a neutral asset class, but as a prerequisite for democratic participation itself.
Frederick Douglass
Douglass understood freedom in the most concrete possible terms: the power to refuse. Slavery, in his analysis, was not only brutality—it was the total foreclosure of exit. Without the ability to leave a bad condition, negotiate terms, or stake a future elsewhere, no contract is voluntary and no market is legitimate. Douglass’s insight scales beyond chattel slavery to any system where necessity is leveraged into compliance. NEWFREEMARKET carries this principle forward structurally: markets remain moral and functional only when refusal is real, not theoretical.
Elinor Ostrom
Ostrom demonstrated—empirically—that communities can govern essential, shared resources without collapsing into either chaos or central control. Her work showed that rules matter more than ownership labels, and that durable systems preserve participation, monitoring, and—critically—credible exit and re-entry. Where users are trapped, resources degrade; where rules keep participation voluntary and adaptive, systems endure. NEWFREEMARKET aligns directly with this continuity: forced arenas require guardrails that keep participation real, while voluntary arenas must remain open to experimentation.
Fernand Braudel
Braudel distinguished between events, cycles, and structures—and showed that structures dominate outcomes over long horizons. Markets that appear dynamic at the surface can be structurally stagnant underneath when access, mobility, and circulation are constrained. Price spikes, booms, and busts are often symptoms, not causes. NEWFREEMARKET adopts Braudel’s lens by treating housing not as a short-term policy problem, but as a deep structure whose misalignment quietly shapes decades of economic and civic life.
James Madison
Madison’s central insight was not optimism about virtue, but realism about incentives. In The Federalist, he argued that stable systems must be designed to contain factional advantage rather than assume good behavior. Power, when unchecked, naturally consolidates; the solution is not moral appeal but structural counterweights. Liberty survives only when ambition is made to counter ambition. NEWFREEMARKET applies this logic economically: when essential markets lack countervailing rules, extraction becomes rational and concentration inevitable. The answer is not trust, but design.
Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu treated victory as a matter of positioning, not force. The most durable outcomes arise when conditions are arranged so conflict is unnecessary and failure becomes unlikely by design. Strategy, in this view, is the shaping of terrain rather than the application of pressure. NEWFREEMARKET mirrors this principle at the system level: instead of punishing actors for rational behavior, it reshapes the arena so destructive strategies lose advantage and cooperative, productive behavior becomes the path of least resistance.
Thorstein Veblen
Veblen exposed how economic behavior often drifts away from productive function toward status, signaling, and extraction. He showed that systems reward not what is socially useful, but what confers advantage under existing rules. Over time, this leads to waste, stagnation, and resentment—not because actors are irrational, but because incentives are misaligned. NEWFREEMARKET inherits this insight by targeting the rules that make extraction rational, rather than moralizing about those who respond to them.
Albert O. Hirschman
Hirschman gave one of the cleanest structural lenses for diagnosing institutional failure: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. When exit is available, systems self-correct. When exit collapses, pressure builds—and voice becomes strained or radicalized. Loyalty without exit breeds quiet decay. Markets that remove exit while insisting participation is voluntary produce neither stability nor legitimacy. NEWFREEMARKET operationalizes Hirschman’s insight by restoring exit in forced arenas so correction happens through movement rather than crisis.
Max Weber
Weber examined how systems gain—or lose—legitimacy. Authority persists not merely through force, but when rules are perceived as rational, predictable, and impersonal. When outcomes appear arbitrary or exploitative, legitimacy erodes even if procedures remain legal. Markets, in Weber’s sense, require more than efficiency; they require trust that rules do not trap participants unfairly. NEWFREEMARKET aligns with this diagnosis by emphasizing predictable alignment over ad hoc intervention—so markets remain governable without coercion.
Hernando de Soto
De Soto showed how vast amounts of value remain trapped when people lack formal, navigable paths to ownership and exchange. Informality isn’t chaos—it’s exclusion produced by systems that are impossible to enter. When assets cannot be legally leveraged, sold, or exited, people are locked into survival modes rather than productive participation. NEWFREEMARKET carries this insight into developed economies: markets that appear formal can still function informally when rules block entry or exit, trapping capital and people alike.
Joseph Schumpeter
Schumpeter argued that capitalism survives through creative destruction—the constant replacement of old arrangements by better ones. But this process fails when incumbents convert advantage into permanent protection. Innovation dies not from competition, but from its suppression. When returns are driven by control of necessities rather than improvement, destruction becomes destructive rather than creative. NEWFREEMARKET preserves Schumpeter’s engine by protecting competitive arenas while preventing forced ones from becoming extraction shields.
Montesquieu
Montesquieu’s central contribution was structural, not moral: power must be divided because it inevitably expands when unconstrained. His theory of separation was not about virtue in rulers, but about preventing any single actor from converting position into permanence. When powers collapse into one another, liberty dissolves without announcement. NEWFREEMARKET applies this same logic economically—separating productive participation from extractive control in forced markets so no actor can convert necessity into indefinite advantage.
John Rawls
Rawls reframed fairness as a property of systems rather than intentions. His central question was not whether outcomes feel just, but whether rules would be chosen without knowing one’s future position within them. This thought experiment does not demand equality; it demands durability. Systems that trap participants in roles they could not rationally accept from the start lose legitimacy over time. NEWFREEMARKET resonates with this insight by insisting that forced markets must remain survivable and reversible, regardless of where one begins.
Daniel Kahneman
Kahneman showed that scarcity fundamentally alters human cognition. Under sustained pressure, people do not simply make worse decisions—they make different ones. Attention narrows, risk assessment degrades, and long-term planning collapses. These effects are not moral failures; they are predictable cognitive responses to constraint. Markets that trap participants in permanent scarcity therefore cannot self-correct through “better choices.” NEWFREEMARKET incorporates this insight by treating exit and surplus not as rewards, but as prerequisites for rational participation.
Amos Tversky
Tversky demonstrated that people under uncertainty rely on heuristics that systematically misfire when stakes are existential. When losses threaten survival rather than comfort, behavior becomes asymmetric, defensive, and risk-seeking in destructive ways. Markets that presume calm optimization while imposing catastrophic downside are therefore misdesigned. NEWFREEMARKET aligns with this finding by insisting that forced markets must eliminate existential risk from ordinary participation if rational behavior is to remain possible.
Friedrich Hayek
Hayek’s core insight was not that markets should be unregulated, but that knowledge is dispersed. No central actor can know enough to allocate resources efficiently across a complex society. Prices work when they transmit real information—but only if participants are free to respond to them. When exit is constrained, prices no longer convey knowledge; they convey power. NEWFREEMARKET preserves Hayek’s insight by insisting that forced markets must be structured so price signals remain meaningful, rather than becoming instruments of capture.
Albert Einstein
Einstein repeatedly warned that systems optimized for narrow goals often produce consequences their designers never intended. Problems, he argued, cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them. This insight applies directly to economic design: markets built to maximize short-term efficiency or extraction often undermine the conditions that make rational exchange possible in the long run. NEWFREEMARKET adopts this systems-level humility—treating housing failure not as a bug to patch, but as a design flaw requiring a higher-order rethink.
John Maynard Keynes
Keynes recognized that markets can remain irrational longer than individuals can remain solvent. His insight was not anti-market, but anti-naïveté: systems that expose participants to catastrophic downside force behavior that appears reckless but is structurally induced. Stability, he argued, requires buffers that prevent ordinary participation from becoming existential risk. NEWFREEMARKET echoes this logic by insisting that forced markets must eliminate survival-level volatility if rational behavior and long-term investment are to persist.
Václav Havel
Havel described how unfree systems persist not primarily through violence, but through quiet compliance. When people adapt to conditions they cannot realistically exit, truth erodes, initiative narrows, and life becomes performative rather than chosen. Power sustains itself by making alternatives feel impractical or dangerous. NEWFREEMARKET draws directly from this insight: markets that deny exit do not merely misallocate resources—they normalize dependency and suppress agency without announcing themselves as coercive.
Isaiah Berlin
Berlin distinguished between formal liberty and real liberty. A person may be free in theory yet constrained in practice by circumstances that make refusal impossible. He warned that systems often confuse the absence of overt restraint with genuine freedom, ignoring how conditions shape choice. NEWFREEMARKET aligns with this distinction by treating exit as the test of liberty: if people cannot realistically leave a bad arrangement, freedom exists in name only.
E. F. Schumacher
Schumacher argued that systems fail when they exceed the scale at which humans can meaningfully participate. Efficiency divorced from human context produces fragility, not strength. Large systems that optimize for output while ignoring lived capacity eventually hollow themselves out. His insight was not anti-growth, but anti-misfit: scale must match purpose. NEWFREEMARKET reflects this directly by separating arenas—allowing scale where participation is voluntary, while preserving human-scale stability where exit is limited.
Peter Drucker
Drucker insisted that systems must be judged by outcomes, not intentions. Good structures make desirable behavior rational; bad ones require constant moral pressure and enforcement. Organizations—and societies—fail when they reward the wrong actions while blaming participants for responding predictably. NEWFREEMARKET inherits this pragmatism: it does not ask people to behave better, but redesigns incentives so productive participation becomes the obvious choice.
Ronald Coase
Coase demonstrated that markets do not fail because people are selfish, but because transaction costs make negotiation and exit impractical. When it is too costly to move, bargain, or change arrangements, power concentrates by default. Property rights and prices only work when participants can realistically respond to them. NEWFREEMARKET applies this insight directly to housing: when exit costs become catastrophic, markets stop allocating efficiently and begin entrenching advantage instead.
Richard Thaler
Thaler showed that people respond to how systems are structured, not how designers wish they would behave. Defaults, constraints, and perceived risk shape outcomes more than formal freedom. When environments are hostile, complex, or punitive, even rational people make defensive choices. NEWFREEMARKET aligns with this realism: it treats housing outcomes as the product of design, not personal failure, and reshapes incentives so constructive behavior becomes the natural path.
G. K. Chesterton
Chesterton articulated a principle now known as Chesterton’s Fence: do not remove a structure until you understand why it was built. This is not conservatism—it is systems literacy. He recognized that many institutions exist not because they are perfect, but because they solve problems that reappear when removed. NEWFREEMARKET applies this insight by refusing to abolish markets, ownership, or profit—while insisting that when a structure produces capture instead of function, it must be redesigned, not denied.
George Washington
Washington’s most important contribution was not conquest or rhetoric—it was restraint. He understood that the greatest threat to any system claiming to protect liberty is the moment power refuses to let go. By voluntarily relinquishing authority—first as general, then as president—he established a precedent more powerful than law: that legitimacy comes from circulation, not permanence.
This aligns cleanly with NEWFREEMARKET’s core logic. Systems fail when roles harden, when advantage becomes hereditary, and when exit is replaced by dependency. Washington proved that durability is not achieved by holding the field indefinitely, but by designing institutions that outlive their winners.
He did not abolish hierarchy.
He prevented it from becoming destiny.