America’s last truly free market

All anybody needs to know about a free economy is alive and well thanks to social media flea markets, such as Facebook Marketplace.

While procrastinating every morning, I review this site looking at cars, lakefront homes and a wide variety of highly entertaining items people are trying to hock.

Facebook Marketplace offers a hands-on lesson in how free-market economics really works.

You see, commerce and trading are what humans do. They are the basis of wealth creation and a thriving civilization.

Somebody with something to sell is eager to find somebody who is willing to buy. The seller and buyer work out an agreement, then make an exchange, and everybody is happy.

Purity and honesty are at the heart of these simple transactions.

An item is only worth what somebody is willing to pay for it. And as millions of transactions take place daily — and the seller tries to fetch as much as possible while the buyer tries to spend as little as possible — a natural market price evolves.

Consider the market for used leather couches.

Some people think that since they paid $2,000 for a new leather couch a few years ago, they can still fetch $1,700 for it now — even though their cat scratched the leather and their dog chewed one of its legs!

Unfortunately for them, their couch is only worth what somebody else is willing to pay for it.

And they’re not willing to pay anything near $1,700 for several reasons.

First off, most people don’t want furniture in their house that was used by somebody else. Reduced desire for the item you wish to sell equals reduced value.

Second, other people may be more motivated to get rid of their leather couches than you.

Maybe they just got divorced, or they’re moving across the country and need to liquidate, or maybe they’re rich and just got a new living room set and want to unload the prior one.

Whatever their motive, some people just want to sell their couch for pennies on the dollar, which beats down the value of your couch all the more.

That means your used, cat-scratched, dog-chewed leather couch is probably worth about 150 bucks on a good day!

That’s the breaks of economic reality — and nothing is more real than a free-functioning economy.

But what if a vote-seeking politician promised people who wanted to buy leather couches a $1,000 subsidy to help them — a Couch Stamp, if you will.

All of the sudden, there would be an unnatural demand for leather couches that would quickly drive leather-couch “values” from $150 to $1,000 and surely more.

The entire used-couch market would be disrupted by the vote-pandering politician and the taxpayers would have to pick up the tab — or more money would have to be borrowed — to pay for the costly disruption.

Thankfully, the government hasn’t bailed out the used-couch marketplace just yet, which is why Facebook Marketplace is such a wonderful example of people freely buying, trading or selling their goods without interference.

As a bonus, Facebook Marketplace also offers entertainment in its purest form, as some fool tries to get, say, $300 for a used commode that is probably worth about 20 bucks.

It’s a delight to watch the humbled seller keep lowering his price to meet the unflushable realities of the used toilet marketplace.

See Tom Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and funny videos featuring his dog, Thurber, at TomPurcell.com. Email him at Tom@TomPurcell.com.