From our freedom to use/transform our private property emerges the ‘freedom to trade’ it with anyone in the entire planet which inadvertently transforms mankind into a global supercomputer where people/companies are motivated to innovate and learn from each other(competitors) thus inadvertently cooperate to create and spread superior information and subsequent order. It is our freedom as consumers to trade our life/order-sustaining wealth for the best cars with the latest features/innovations, and as producers to go into the auto-manufacturing business, which motivates existing auto manufacturers(competitors) to innovate/compete/copy/learn to produce the best cars. Just like in the Olympics we can discover the best athletes in the world due to global competition, so does having the ‘freedom to trade’ with everyone in the world allows the best ideas to compete/spread globally thus ensuring the best possible global order. As cost-cutting ideas emerge and inevitably spread via competition leading relative prices to continuously fall, new profitable ideas easily arise and once again spread via competition in an endless cycle of knowledge generation/innovation. For example, computers were once very expensive, but once the price of making them came down enough, people easily realized that every home could have them, which gave birth to our computerized world and the Internet and all the great things that flow from it. The more wealth is produced, the more wealth has to be offered in exchange for labor as companies/orders compete against each other for the labor they need which helps explain why the economic pie grows for everyone.
Morals are knowledge which also emerges and spreads via economic competition. It is hard-working, tolerant, courteous people who thanks to competition inevitably motivate everyone else to be likewise. As 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics F.A. Hayek writes:
“Competition is, after all, always a process in which a small number makes it necessary for larger numbers to do what they do not like, be it to work harder, to change habits, or to devote a degree of attention, continuous application, or regularity to their work which without competition would not be needed.”
As millions of Britons, Germans and others from all over the world came to America, it was ultimately the competition which grows from ‘private property’ and thus individual liberty/freedom which stripped these people of their otherwise nationalistic/ethnocentric/tribalistic identities and evolved what came to be seen as the classic American character/ethos of wanting to be seen as a reputable/honest businessman/professional who treats everyone with respect and wears a business suit as opposed to older religious/ethnocentric dress.
The role of governments/coercion should be minimized because governmental/‘public sector’ bureaucracies, being COERCIVE MONOPOLIES which get their life/order-sustaining wealth through taxes/compulsion are immune to the competitive-information-spreading incentives/pressures which motivate private sector entities to keep up with the competition in terms of information and hustle. Central/government plans can’t work if people are free to not go along with them so they inevitably require compulsion/tyranny. The former Soviet Union had plenty of highly educated scientists/“experts” whose plans required the coercion of millions, but they were thoroughly crushed by relatively freer Americans and their resulting superior “competitive knowledge discovery”. The “classic” image below helps explain the difference between competitive/private/free orders(South Korea) and monopolistic/government/coerced orders (North Korea). Keep your eye on how information arises/spreads via competition and continuously restructures the social order.
In the free/private/competitive sector information moves from the bottom (individual minds/entrepreneurs/innovators) to others/influencers/many/top as it is ‘tested’/refined/preferred by the comparisons to other information by billions of free minds thus ensuring superior information spreads and is ideally adapted to each specific time and place. This mechanism is bypassed by government regulations which are top-down/coercive/competitionless/monopoly information/action which is not subject to continuous improvement/replacement via competition so they paralyze entire industries slowing down ‘competitive knowledge discovery’, driving up costs (more lawyers/regulators/bureaucrats), and potentially making criminals out of people who harm nobody but just prefer to do things differently. Hayek reminds us:
“The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.”
Compare the increasingly regulated/paralyzed healthcare sector which has grown from consuming less than 5% of the economic pie in 1960 to over 20% today, to the free/competitive IT sector where even the poorest can afford rapidly improving amazing cell phones and technology. What a person must learn in order to legally offer medical advice via licensing of doctors, where he must learn it via licensing of medical schools, what chemical compounds can be legally consumed, how to test drugs, how the medical insurance industry should work, and countless other gigantic bodies of knowledge/information are dictated by monopolistic competition-less bureaucracies/Priesthoods like the American Medical Association (AMA), CDC and numerous others leading to the spectacular coercive CovidMania tyranny. By comparison, the Information Technology sector has very few government regulations so competition motivates the discovery and spread of superior information at breakneck speed and is obviously transforming the world right before our eyes. In graph below one can see how the more regulated a sector is (Hospital Services) the more expensive/paralyzed/consumptive it becomes.
Thus we can see that freedom, as opposed to leading to chaos, is what leads to the emergence and spread of the information needed to create our social order and thus our very lives, it civilizes our morals, it shields us from coercion, and is also indispensable for discovering THE TRUTH! Freedom is the ultimate algorithm!
