Where in the world are truly free markets?” a friend asked me the other day. “The kind of economic freedom you libertarians dream of just doesn’t work. Freedom leads to chaos. All markets need to be regulated by the government, which alone can safeguard the interests of the people.”

“Have you been online recently,” I asked.

“Don’t change the subject,”

he said.

“I’m not,” I replied.

A couple of years ago, the libertarian blogger Warren Meyer was asked why there were so many, well, libertarian bloggers. His reply, in a nutshell, was that the Internet is a libertarian space. “Libertarianism resists organisation,” he wrote. Libertarians tend to be “suspicious of top-down organisation in and of

itself. Blogging is therefore tailor made for us — many diverse bottom-up messages rather than one official top-down one.”

In many ways, the online world is like the beautifully functioning free market that governments have never allowed in meatspace (the ‘real’ world). To begin with, the government does not pose an entry barrier to individuals who wish to have a presence online. You want to start a blog? It’ll take you three clicks to set one up. You don’t need a licence for it, and you won’t have inspectors coming over and scrutinising your methods of work.

The blogosphere is a meritocratic space. Each blog finds the audience it deserves. If you like economics, you’ll find tonnes of good economics blogs, often much better than anything you’ll see in the mainstream media, because they’re written by specialists, not generalists. You want gardening? Literature? Technology? You’ll find content in any niche you can think of.

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