The Inevitable Triumph of Spontaneous Orders

Timothy Ferris argues in The Science of Liberty that it was the emergence of the spontaneous order of science that laid the groundwork for the emergence of economics as a spontaneous order and of liberal democracy. Naturally, he does not quite use these terms, but if you have read Butos and McQuade on science as a spontaneous order, there is no question what Ferris is talking about. Further, the democratic spontaneous order, by valuing spontaneous orders themselves, keeps science a spontaneous order, thus keeping it alive. Dictatorships such as Fascism, National Socialism, and Communism/International Socialism try to turn spontaneous orders into organizations and, thus, destroy them. This includes science. Scientists in the scientific order combined with entrepreneur/inventors in the economic order create more and better technology -- something that is gradually lost in socialist systems such as those listed above. As a result, countries with such systems fall farther and farther behind, and are continually outstripped by spontaneous order societies. The fact that the U.S. and Britain were both spontaneous order societies allowed them to defeat Fascism/Nazism and, later, Communism. To the extent that we are liberal spontaneous order societies, we will continue to grow and succeed; to the extent that we move away from such a system, we face continued degradation.