When my wife was a liberal, she complained that libertarian reasoning is coldhearted. Since markets produce winners and losers and many losers did nothing wrong market competition is cruel. It must seem so. President Obama used the word fair in his last State of the Union address nine times.

We are imprinted to prefer a world that is fair. Our close relatives the chimpanzees freak out when one chimp gets more than his fair share, so zookeepers are careful about food portions. Chimps are hardwired to get angry when they think they've been cheated and so are we.

Filmmaker Michael Moore took this notion about fairness to its intuitive conclusion during an interview with Laura Flanders of GRITtv, saying of rich people's fortunes: That's not theirs! That's a national resource! That's ours! As is typical, Moore was confused or disingenuous. In our corporatist economy, some fortunes are indeed made illegitimately though political means. The privileges that produce those fortunes should be abolished. But contrary to Moore, incomes are not national resources. If he's concerned with illegitimate fortunes, he should favor freeing markets.

Fairness is related to justice, the recognition of people's rights to their own lives.

A free market will create big differences in wealth. That wealth disparity is simply a byproduct of freedom vastly diverse individuals competing to serve consumers will arrive at vastly diverse outcomes.

That disparity is not unfair if it results from free exchange.

The free market (which, sadly, America doesn't have) is fair. It also produces better outcomes. Even losers do pretty well.

A more astute observer than Moore might show how unfair government intervention is. Licenses, taxes, regulations and corporate subsidies make it harder for the average worker to start his own business, to go from being a little guy to being an independent owner of means of production. Most new businesses fail, but running your own business is the best route to prosperity and surveys suggest happiness, too.

I once opened a dinky business called The Stossel Store in Delaware, hawking hats, books and other goodies on the street. It was hard to open this store. I chose Delaware because it's supposedly the state that makes that easiest but easiest didn't mean easy. I still required help from Fox's lawyers to get the permits, and the process took more than a week. In my hometown, New York City, it would have taken much longer.

By contrast, in Hong Kong, I started a business in one day. Hong Kong's limited government makes it easy for people to try things, and that has allowed poor people to prosper. Regular people benefit most from economic freedom.

The rest is here:

Defining fairness in a big, modern society