- Productiveness: The free market rewards the producerranging from the common worker to the plant manager to the engineer to the scientist to the philosopheraccording to the value that he or she produces.
- Pride: The free market encourages each individual to aspire to all of the virtues in the maximum degree possible. (In the cynical climate of our current mixed economy, in contrast, any such aspiration is apt to be denounced as arrogance or hubris.)
Of course, the practice of these virtues also reaps long-run rewards in a less free society such as our ownbut only after many unnecessary struggles and frustrations for those who practice them.
As individuals learn to act more responsibly and to practice these virtues, their living standards steadily improve. Moreover, in the free market virtuous actions generally lead to clearly positive results, especially in the prevailing conditions of general prosperity. Consequently, the experiences of individuals help them to acquire confidence in their ability to deal with the worldin short, a sense of personal efficacy (cf. p. 3.11:1). The widespread, growing sense of personal responsibility and efficacy contributes to and reinforces the popular understanding of individualist principles posited at the start of this analysis.