Think about what happens there. Production is actually transformation. The entrepreneur's profit is the difference between those two prices, his reward for figuring this all out. State and market, then, are opposites, embodying, respectively, force and creativity. That is why the mission to finely adjust the frontier between the two, as Yergin and Stanislaw wish, is misconceived.
Force is appropriate only against force.
The frontier between the state and market has only one right position, precisely at the point that leaves people free to do as they will so long as they recognize the same right held by everyone else. At the time of the original publication, Sheldon Richman was editor of The Freeman. Reprinted with permission from The Freeman, a publication of The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., May 1998, Vol. 48, No. 5.