I recently read an abridged version of an essay called “The Use of Knowledge in Society” by Friedrich Hayek. In it, he says something that I consider to be very peculiar.

He’s talking about how the overarching system of prices in the market evolved into existence before any one person knew exactly what it was let alone understood how to use it.

Man has been able to develop that division of labor on which our civilization is based because he happened to stumble upon a method which made it possible. Had he not done so, he might still have developed some other, altogether difference, type of civilization, something like the “state” of the termite ants, or some other altogether unimaginable type.

I can’t tell if he’s being silly or not. Perhaps he was trying to be charmingly naïve as gentlepersons are wont from time to time. (I think that’s very not charming especially in writing seriously on economics.) So, I am prompted to make this statement: It is not possible to plan or develop a system of pricing or trade that is more successful than the market economy.

The market economy is certainly an accidental development along with the rise of civilization but it is not an alternative to some other successful system of trade that might have been developed if only some one caveman had killed a different wooly mammoth or a peculiar Amazonian butterfly flapped its wings just once more. It’s not simply that we can’t imagine another system of trade between human beings. It’s that the market economy is the natural and logical consequence of the fact that we are human beings.

I don’t really want to get into how Capitalism is the only moral form of political interaction between people, but it is. What I do want to get into is the fact that it’s also the only natural way for people to live with one another.

We are not termites. We are not honey bees. We are not a troupe of baboons. We are not a murder of crows, a gaggle of geese, a pod of whales, a swarm of locusts, or any other sort of accidental or even purposeful collusion of animals. Human beings are certainly animals in the biological sense, but as such we are a unique species unto ourselves with unique characteristics including those that lead us to fraternize in the ways that we do.

As human beings any attempt to live like termites or plasmodia or whooping cranes is foolishness. Any attempt to run society like a hive, a pride, a swarm, or a flock is guaranteed to be a failure.

Posted by: Flibbertigibbet at 02:12 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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