I keep running into people who do not even understand how free commerce could ever work, how it could even possibly be a good idea. If you let businessmen do whatever they want, then they will charge wildly high prices and pay wildly low wages. For that matter, there is an implicit assumption that businessmen are some other kind of person, born into some other class. Many of these people who are happy to embrace social freedoms, but they scoff at economic freedoms.
Given this backdrop, it was a pleasure for me to read "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen" by Frédéric Bastiat. Bastiat was a lonely capitalist in 19th century France. In this piece, he systematically analyzes the opportunity cost of a variety of statist policies. Progressives, don't run too fast -- Bastiat freely admits, all throughout, that individual statist policies can very well have benefits worth their cost. What he argues with, systematically, is the economic arguments for such policies. It is good reading if you want a deeper understanding of how free commerce works, of what is sacrificed when we spend money via the state instead of spending it directly ourselves.