Two centuries after Adam Smith penned his eloquent defense of the right to be free from coercion, coercion is again in the ascendancy. It is seen by many as the “quick fix,” the answer to chronic problems, a panacea that will bring order out of chaos. In 1795, James Madison described this phenomenon as “the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in government.”

It ought to be obvious that trade is a two-way street. In a free mar­ket, where trade is a voluntary, de­sired, and spontaneous feature of human action, there is a "perfect balance."

No wonder economics is labeled "the dismal science," one hundred years after Thomas Carlyle coined the phrase. Under the spell of mathematics, it has been reduced to cold, hard statistics. Acting man somehow has been left out of the picture, replaced by lifeless graphs and equations.