3 ms·

1. "rational" self-interest 2. (magic happens) 3. the greater good What I've noticed is that two categories of people believe in such schemes: libertarians,

• ArkyBeagle 13y ago
  This doesn't happen in a vaccuum. You need the law, too. The Anarchist version of Libertarianism is mostly speculative fiction, although it can be good spec. fic. David Friedman's one of the best people I've ever read. The "magic" is called "consumer surplus" and it's one of the few defensible things in macroeconomics. It's quite real. The paradox is that explicitly trying to do things for the greater good very often backfires - although not always. But as a "control law" - in the sense of running a distributed, massive system - self-interest produces measurably better results than Soviet-style central planning. This rests on information-theoretic foundations and it's early days yet. We're pathetic at macroeconomics, and it's a lot captured by both whim of the moment. Of course, now we have a lot of hybrids, some that work much better than free markets, some that don't. That's quite new, assuming nothing bad happens to them.