Friday, July 11, 2008

Natural Economy vs. Manmade Economy

There is something faintly ridiculous in defending a naturally occurring system against artificial constructs. Free market economies are bottom-up, productive, complex, creative systems; all man-made (developed first in the mind of man rather than occurring through human interactions -- such as socialism, welfare statism, fascism, and communism) are top-down, entropic, simplifying, dehumanizing systems. So supporting free market economics -- the form of economy which emerged naturally through voluntary exchange first in northern Italy, and then in the Netherlands and in England -- is not ideological any more than supporting the heliocentric view of the solar system is ideological. Saying "I support free markets" is a lot like saying, "I support the ecosystem," or "I support the planets orbiting the sun," or "I support atomic theory," or "I support evolutionary theory." In other words, expressing support for free market economics is expressing support for a naturally-occurring system. What we really don't like is that free market economies are outside of our control, and we hate to have anything not in our control. The opposition to free markets is all about control and power. We have learned that we can't take that attitude toward the ecosystem -- when will we learn that we can't take that attitude toward the economy, either?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Saw your comment on EconLog and concur. A related thought:

http://anittahpatrick.com/thinking/on-using-legislation-to-manufacture-demand/2008/07/15

Anonymous said...

Looks like the URL was gobbled. another try