How ‘Private Property’ “Turns On” Economic Competition And Thus The Spread of Superior Information, Order and Morals.

In the socioeconomic order new/superior information arises and spreads thanks to ‘economic competition’. Why are BMW, Ford, Toyota, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and all private sector entities constantly innovating and/or copying each other’s innovations thus continuously reordering society in superior ways as fast as humanly possible/profitable? Because the concept/tradition of ‘private property’ gives everyone in our role as consumers the ‘freedom to trade’ our life/order-sustaining wealth for what we calculate/think is best. This freedom in turn forces everyone, in our role as producers, to discover how to order ourselves in a manner that produces something society/customers value (our labor, a product/service), which we do by, once again, innovating and/or copying existing ideas/information, in other words, by competing in the economic sense. Just like in the Olympics we can discover the best athletes in the world due to global competition, so does free-trade among all nations/peoples/orders allows the best ideas to compete and spread globally thus ensuring the best possible global order. As cost-cutting ideas emerge and inevitably spread via competition leading prices to continuously fall, new profitable ideas 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 entrepreneurs/companies/orders compete against each other for the labor they need which helps explain why the economic pie grows for everyone. We should also quickly add that morals are simply ways of acting, they are knowledge, which like most knowledge, emerges and spreads via economic competition. Companies/orders that hire/nourish/‘trade with’ lazy, disrespectful, or corrupt people will be less competitive and be inevitably pressured to hire people with better morals which in turn forces everyone to be respectful and hardworking regardless of race, sex, etc. Similarly, it is hard-working, tolerant, courteous people who thanks to competition inevitably force everyone else to be likewise. As Hayek tells us:

“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.” (Hayek)

And with respect to a culture of enterprise, Hayek again:

“those who are inclined to argue that competition will not work among people who lack the spirit of enterprise: let merely a few rise and be esteemed and powerful because they have successfully tried new ways, even if they may be in the first instance foreign intruders, and let those tempted to imitate them be free to do so, however few they may be in the first instance, and the spirit of enterprise will emerge by the only method which can produce it. Competition is as much a method for breeding certain types of mind as anything else: the very cast of thinking of the great entrepreneurs would not exist but for the environment in which they developed their gifts.” (Hayek)

Governmental/public sector orders, being MONOPOLIES which get their life/order-sustaining wealth through taxes/compulsion are thus immune to the competitive-information-spreading pressures which motivate the private sector to be efficient/innovative so they obviously don’t have to “to work harder, to change habits, or to devote a degree of attention, continuous application, or regularity to their work”