Rick Lowe
My Friend in Liberty, Lawrence Reed, president of FEE, was on John Stossel’s Fox Business show recently speaking about Spontaneous Order.
Ah, the wonder of the free market…
Enjoy
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With all due respect, the more one learns in general about the Social Sciences and more specifically Economics, it seems that only names (labels) change while the underlying principles of economic theory, concepts and laws remain constant.. The fundamental basis in Economics is the Law of Supply and Demand which functions in both Free Markets (called sometimes in the past Open Markets) as well as Planned Markets (often described as economic planning).. I guess “spontaneous order” is just another way of describing the “Invisible Hand” of Adam Smith, the father of modern economic..
Writing in the 18th century, Adam Smith argued that the natural functions of markets, where price was determined by supply and demand, would always ensure stability, prosperity and the maximization of resource usage.. The market, in Smith’s view, provides a site where human fulfillment (spontaneous order) through barter, production and trade would take place, and the invisible hand would reconcile these individual activities to maintaining an equilibrium or a state in which opposite economic forces would tend to balance each other and economic stability would be obtained..
In reality economic principles and laws seldom if ever change over time.. Yet the terms and definitions used by today’s practitioners to describe these time tested principles are always changing to suite the changing circumstances of our times.. As for me I shall stick with the esoteric invisible hand which has provided me with a reasonable basis to try to understand the dynamics of economic activity as it is related to human endeavor and social behaviorism..