[Borodog]

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You're much more interesting to read when you're lucid.

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An outline of what I've said: "Those who understand how unplanned selection amongst competing variants leads to staggering order should understand that selection by consumers amongst competing producers leads to staggering social order without requiring any central planning (i.e. government)."

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This is a monstrous claim. A few of the problems I can see with it:

- You're isolating the act of consumer selection and comparing only that to evolution. There are many more factors not analogous to evolution that affect social order.

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Actually, I'm not. That was simply the example I gave to show why your fallacious argument was not analogous to mine. Selection is a huge part of it, but there are other extremely important parts. Specialization, division of labor and exchange, profit maximization (psychic in economics, reproductive in evolution), cost minimization, all sort of things.

And the point has never been that the two are perfectly analogous; they aren't. The point is that both are the same type of phenomena, processes that generate spontaneous order from simple truths and the logical consequences thereof, completely in the absence of a central, overarching plan.

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- You do not in any way quantify the time scales involved or the breadth of the trials. Evolution required a billion years and trillions of parallel trials to produce a single worm. A designer (or a tweaker) could do far better.

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Who cares? This is what you always do. Splash around for irrelevent things to attempt to distract from the point that you are losing the central argument. Social ordering on a far shorter timescale than biological evolution because mankind has the ability to plan rationally into the future, whereas the appearance of design in evolution can only appear in hindsight. The variability of form is generated randomly in evolution over generational timescales, whereas the variability in form in the market is generated non-randomly through rational planning.

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- The process already exists, in huge volumes. Businesses that can provide what people want grow and do well, those that can't, die off. We see it with hundreds of thousands of startups every year. You fail to explain how removing government from this process will greatly spur the system to becoming a supersystem, when consumer choice is already the main selection mechanism for the vast majority of goods and businesses.

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My god how you do miss the point. The point is EXACTLY that social order ALREADY arises from the market and that the CENTRAL PLANNING is NOT NECESSARY, not that the removing the central planning will somehow result in some "supersystem." I boggle.

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That's kind of off topic, but related to point: how do you explain the situation in Somalia?

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Oh boy! Argumentum ad Somalio! My favorite! [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

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Surely they have a vast number of people willing to sell goods and a vast number of people wanting to buy them. HEAPS of selection pressure. And yet there is little social order, and it's far from a desirable place to live.

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For perhaps the hundredth time - a society that has little accumulated capital and a culture that does not respect private property will not be a happy place to live in, and the choatic end-state of a government implosion is an argument against the STATE, not the LACK of it. The hangover you get in the morning is because you were drunk last night, not because you aren't drinking this morning.

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- You haven't demonstrated that the market is a better selector of fitness than the government. Isn't the government comprised of people as well?

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Lol. So it is your contention that the minds of the small fraction of people in government are better at planning than the massive number of minds of the consumers? This is what Hayek called the "Pretence of Knowledge".

The ends desired by people are distributed throughout the economy. The means are also distributed throughout the economy. The information required to make rational decisions about houw best to apply those means to achieve those ends is also distributed throughout the economy. Clearly the most efficient way to carry out economic planning is to take advantage of this inherent distribution of ends, means, and information by allowing each actor to decide for himself how to allocate the means under his control to best achieve the ends he desires using the information he has at hand. The central planners cannot know what the ends desired by the multitudes of individuals are; rather they create one-size-fits-all ends that are enforced on everyone. The means to these ends must be violently taken away from the individuals, having all sorts of deleterious incentive effects. Lastly, the information can never be centralized; it's litterally impossible. The minds of those few can no more replace the planning of so many than the legs of the few could support the weight of the many.

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There are many different types of selection in evolution also, and some are highly beneficial. For example, the government may provide selection pressure for those that do business honestly, or that accurately report the weight of their products, or that don't collude, or that don't pollute the environment. They do this via regulations. I fail to see how many of these things are negative selection pressures.

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You fail to see a lot. So what is new?

I refer you to regulatory capture theory, that explains how government regulation of the market is always subject to capture by the very entities it is supposed to be regulating. In fact, most of the major regulatory agencies were agitated for by the very industries they regulate as protectionist tools against would-be competition, and the regulations, sold to the public as great social boons, are actually great social boondoogles, written by the very interests they are supposed to regulate.

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I also fail to see how consumer selection pressure is magically the path to social order and automatically superior to government choice. What you lack is hard evidence that the market can indeed produce the desirable kind of order.

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See, this is the crux. You simply don't get it. The reason that the market is better is that it allows any and all participants to be ever vigilant for the opportunity to improve something and better satisfy consumers. Then the market provides them a mechanism to try it out. If they are incorrect and consumers don't benefit from their idea, the market tells them and quickly puts a stop to their waste of resources. If they are correct, and better serve consumers, the market also tells them this and rewards them with access to more resources that they can attempt to put to better use for consumers. This process, the rivalrous competition amongst producers to better supply consumers cannot do anything but tend to radically increase the supply of scarce goods and services to consumers over time.

Contrast this with the alternative, the government process. Only those within government are allowed to define what is and is not a problem, and only they get to choose what is to be the "solution" to that problem, and this solution is unilaterally enforced on everyone and institutionalized. The government suffers no losses and cannot go out of business; rather the public must suffer its losses indefinitely. Would-be competition is squeezed out or outlawed.

That anyone could POSSIBLY think the latter process could possibly produce a "more desirable kind of order" than the former really shows how little understanding they have of the nature of either.

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Which leads to my killer point:

- How do you define order? Evolution produces "staggering order". The market can produce "staggering social order". But what kind of order? Is a system where warlords roam over the country, collecting extortion money, "ordered"? Is a system where a tyrant rules over the land, "order"? What about one where society collapses, and descends into violent anarchy? Is that still "order"? In the evolutionary sense, such a system is analogous to what goes on in the body via cancer and the immune system.

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You're still not getting it. Evolutionary selection works on variants by selecting for those that maximize reproductive profits and minimize costs. The market process tends towards ever higher levels of social order, i.e. peaceful organization of society, for the exact same reasons: conflict and violence is risky and costly. Specialization, the division of labor and peaceful exchange are more profitable because they are (a) inherently more productive and (b) inherently less risky and costly than the alternatives. Ultimately, societies that institutionalize plunder fail while societies that institutionalize peaceful production and trade thrive.

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What this basically means: The evolution analogue does not provide evidence that society will have any kind of order resembling something that people would want. Which is the only thing in question when it comes to AC.

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Like I said. The subject is just beyond you.

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In your reply to Mr. Blah:
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Because if you actually understood evolutionary theory and could apply the principles to political and economic theory, you would understand that it is actually the market that best protects the "stupid" and the weak, and that "the resulting economic inefficiencies" of government are exactly the costs which harm the less "privileged" individuals the most.

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Doesn't evolution kill off the stupid and the weak? Isn't that one of the main processes by which it works? The strong take the resources and breeding opportunities from the weak. Similarly, the market kills off the inefficient and those who can't appeal effectively to the whims of their fellow humans. I fail to see how this qualifies as protection...

If you wish to argue that the Eugenics is a noble goal, or that nature-induced eugenics is tolerable or desirable, then that's an interesting but separate discussion.


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See, this is what I mean when I say you don't even understand the concepts being discussed. You are still incapable of understanding the anaolgy, or apparently of even understanding evolution. No, evolution does not "kill off the stupid and the weak." This is such as essential fact that I can only conclude that you don't understand evolution at all. Evolution simply favors those forms that are more reproductively profitable. A sterile individual, or a "stupid and weak" one, can live a happy and long life and not be "killed off by evolution". He simply won't pass on his genes to the next generation.

The market doesn't kill producers who fail to satisfy consumers. It just drives them out of business, it compells them to stop wasting scarce resources and find something more productive to do in the eyes of their fellow men.

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One of the functions of government (and one of its evils according to you) is that it subsidizes the weak.

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What a complete and total strawman. I'm a free market anarchist precisely BECAUSE I understand that it is the market that best provides for the poor and the weak. That was the point of all the examples that I gave of market competition providing for the poor and the weak in my response to MrBlah, you know, the ones you ignored.

A) Just because an organization claims to have something noble as its goal doesn't mean that is the actual goal, and

B) It doesn't matter that your goal is noble if your means cannot possibly achieve that goal, and are in fact directly counterproductive to it.

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Unless you think the weak and sick suffer merely from lack of motivation, I don't see the case that the market will protect them.

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Like I keep saying, that's simply because you seem incapable of understanding the simple fact that the market is composed of rivalrous producers, each competiting to supply consumers, including the weak and the sick, better than his competition. It's such a simple concept that it boggles the mind that you can't comprehend it. Does the government compel people to make eyeglasses because they otherwise wouldn't? Hearing aids? Orthopedic shoes? Artificial limbs? Wheelchairs? Aspririn? Asthma medication? Bandaids? Crutches? The private sector provides for the weak and infirm because it is PROFITABLE TO DO SO. That you cannot understand such a basic, elementary concept is astounding.

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Unless you want to go with George Bush's "make the pie higher" philosophy, which is neither properly quantified nor particularly supported by any evidence IMO.

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Unless you show that you can begin to comprehend the discussion at hand, I think I'm done.