How exactly does the free market allow for the citizens of a free society to grow?
Firstly, the free market does not discriminate. It allows people of any creed to be able to go out and achieve, to study what they want, apply wherever they want or to start their own businesses, as there is no systematic legal discrimination against any type of people. Also, as the name might imply, a free market is free of legal regulations (aside from fraud and other non-aggression principle violations of course), many of which make starting and growing a business far more difficult. In fact, these regulations actually help the larger corporations flush out their smaller competition and many a times it’s these very same big businesses that lobby their crony pals in the government for more regulations.
Simply put, in a free market, the businesses which provide the best quality product or service for the lowest price will always end up on top. Competition, which is abundant in a free market, will ensure competing companies are always researching new innovative ways to improve product quality while reducing the costs to keep up with their rival firms to keep a share of the market. This allows for the best products to slowly but surely become affordable to the average consumer.
Take for example the cost of a smart phone today as opposed to what it would have cost to have the same tech in the 1990s. As Bret Swanson writes in an article for the Foundation for Economic Education, a 2016 iPhone 7 would cost around 12.66 million dollars in 1991. 5.76 million for the 128GB flash memory, 3.6 million for the processing power and 3.3 million for the 4G internet speed of 33 Mbps. Note that this is the price without accounting for the camera, RAM, software and inflation.
This phenomena is seen everywhere. Advancements in cars, computers, televisions, movies or video games have improved the quality of the lives of hundreds of millions of people (which is why people spend so much on them, which allows the companies to reinvest the revenue and keep improving).
