The law of displacement is important to us for two reasons:

It applies to many of the various forms of intervention investigated below, showing some consequences of such intervention that might not otherwise be obvious.
It demonstrates that intervention cannot be treated merely as a superficial "add-on" to our free-market analysis, because intervention dramatically alters the value scales (and even the psycho-epistemology) of market participants. In particular, we should be wary of assuming that the goods, services, prices, and conditions of a free-market system would be comparable to the market system in the current United States, which is highly affected by numerous subsidies and other interventions.

Each of the interventionist policies discussed below involves the initiation of force (or threat of force) by governmental authorities, preventing individuals from engaging in certain voluntary transactions and activities of the free marketplace. Because the possible forms of intervention are almost limitless, we shall focus our attention only on some of the most important, concluding with some principles to guide the student who wishes to apply his or her reasoning power to other such policies.

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