John Stossel, over at Townhall, brings us some food for thought.
Politicians have big plans for us.
President Joe Biden repeatedly says, “I have a plan for that.”
“I alone can fix it,” shouted President Donald Trump.
But most of life, and the best of life, happens when politicians butt out and let us make our own choices.
Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou called that “spontaneous order.” Thousands of years later, economist F. A. Hayek added that order comes “not from design, but spontaneously.”
In other words, no central authority can ever hope to manage the economic decisions of millions of people making billions of decisions, every day.
Here’s the real point, though:
“Think about spontaneous order on a road,” says The Atlas Network’s Tom Palmer.
Right. Millions of people, some of them morons, propel 4,000-pound vehicles at 60 miles per hour, right next to each other. We rarely smash into each other.
There are rules, like “pass on the left,” but for the most part, people navigate highways on their own.
Likewise, no one invented language, but the world has thousands. “Experts” tried to invent better ones, like Volapuk and Esperanto, which supposedly would let us communicate better.
“No one speaks these languages,” says Palmer, because language evolves spontaneously. “That is always superior to top-down systems that rely on the information in one brain.”
Imposed behavior, sooner or later, always gives way to spontaneous behavior. The failure of Esperanto was a small example. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a big example.
Why can’t elected and appointed “officials” get this? History is replete with examples: Prohibition, Communism, National Socialism – sooner or later people will do what they damn well please, even if doing so means black markets and other ways of defying authority.
Liberty is always the best and most beneficial for humans to exist. This is just another argument to that end.
