[Borodog]

Further drunken thoughts:

Borodog's First Law: The market is smarter than you are.
Borodog's Second Law: Order is the daughter, not the mother, of the market.

I think it was Dawkins that once observed that every amazing innovation ever devised by man was previously discovered by nature in evolution. I believe this is true even of Austrian economics and praxeology itself.

Praxeology is the study of purposeful action. Evolution crafts amazing things that appear to have been designed, i.e. they have every appearance of being the result of purposeful action. This is why economic theory is so applicable to evolutionary theory and vice versa. Nature invented cost accounting aeons ago, but the comensurate unit was not money, but rather reproductive success. Organisms minimize costs and maximize reproductive profits. They engage in specialization and the division of labor and exchange, even with species they should be mortal enemies with. They develop property rights and systems of rights observation and enforcement to minimize conflicts and costs. Evolution acts to lower their time preference even if they cannot rationally plan into the far future (does the squirrell know why he gathers and buries nuts? Does he understand the coming winter? Evolution does). For any variation to thrive in the evolutionary market it must pay for itself by reaping reproductive profits. Variants that suffer reproductive losses are driven from the market.

Vice versa, where selection can produce astounding order in the biological realm without a central plan, so too does selection produce astounging order in the economic realm without one either. The Invisible Hand is the right hand of the Blind Watchmaker.

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If during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, producers vary at all in their satisfactions of consumer wants, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the scarcity of goods and the unendingness of wants, a severe struggle for consumers' dollars, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite ingenuity of producers, causing the production of an infinite diversity in goods and services, to be advantageous to the consumers, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each producer's own profits, in the same way as so many variations have occurred useful to life. But if goods and services useful to consumers do occur, assuredly producers providing goods and services thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for dollars; and from the strong principle of profit they will tend to produce competing firms similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, the Market.

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