No, I didn’t relinquish my title as Director of Education Policy at SMI to become the Institute’s new food critic, but the teacher in me loved this video series I recently stumbled across in which an enterprising YouTuber decided to make his own chicken sandwich from scratch.
And when I say from scratch, I mean, from scratch.
He harvests the vegetables, he kills (fair warning, graphically) the chicken, and he even evaporates his own salt from the ocean! Really, what he did was a millennial-focused version of I, Pencil, the famous free market lesson popularized by Nobel-Prize winning economist Milton Friedman in his Free to Choose television series.
In both videos, the incredible organizing capacity of the free market is brought into stark relief. If we didn’t trade with each other or specialize in raising chickens or harvesting vegetables, most of the modern conveniences we take for granted would be completely impossible.
We often like to talk about the power of the free market in macro terms, using it to explain why Myanmar is rising while Venezuela is falling. But the benefits of the free market are much more prosaic. From the writing utensils we use to the food we eat, the mutual cooperation that the free market enables is on full display, if we choose to see it.
