“If freedom and the growth of the market are each important for the development of each individual and, therefore, to the flowering of diversity and individual differences, then so is there a causal connection between freedom and economic growth. For it is precisely freedom, the absence or limitation of interpersonal restrictions or interference, that sets the stage for economic growth and hence of the market economy and the developed division of labor. The Industrial Revolution and the corollary and consequent economic growth of the West were a product of its relative freedom for enterprise, for invention and innovation, for mobility and the advancement of labor. Compared to societies in other times and places, eighteenth and nineteenth century Western Europe and the United States were marked by a far greater social and economic freedom—a freedom to move, invest, work, and produce—secure from much harassment and interference by government. Compared to the role of government elsewhere, its role in these centuries in the West was remarkably minimal.
By allowing full scope for investment, mobility, the division of labor, creativity, and entrepreneurship, the free economy thereby creates the conditions for rapid economic development. It is freedom and the free market, as Adam Smith well pointed out, that develop the "wealth of nations." Thus, freedom leads to economic development, and both of these conditions in turn multiply individual development and the unfolding of the powers of the individual man. In two crucial ways, then, freedom is the root; only the free man can be fully individuated and, therefore, can be fully human.” - Murray Rothbard, ‘Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor’ (1971)
