Disillusionment and disenchantment with American capitalism might yet lead to a tectonic ideological shift from laissez faire and self policy to state intervention and guideline. It would also cast some basic-- and way more ancient-- tenets of free-marketry in grave doubt.

Markets are viewed as self-organizing, self-assembling, exchanges of info, goods, and services. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is the amount of all the systems whose interaction generates the optimal allotment of economic resources. The market's fantastic advantages over central planning are exactly its randomness and its lack of self-awareness.

Market individuals go about their egoistic business, trying to maximize their utility, unconcerned of the interests and action of all, bar those they interact with directly. Thus, any intervention and disturbance are deemed to be destructive to the appropriate functioning of the economy.

It is a small step from this idealized worldview back to the Physiocrats, who preceded Adam Smith, and who propounded the teaching of "laissez faire, laissez passer"-- the hands-off battle cry. Theirs was a natural faith. The market, as a heap of individuals, they roared, was certainly entitled to take pleasure in the rights and freedoms accorded to each and every person. John Stuart Mill weighed versus the state's participation in the economy in his influential and exquisitely-timed "Principles of Political Economy", published in 1848.

Undaunted by mounting evidence of market failures-- for instance to supply economical and abundant public goods-- this flawed theory returned with a vengeance in the last twenty years of the previous century. Privatization, deregulation, and self-regulation became faddish buzzwords and part of a global agreement propagated by both business banks and multilateral lenders.

As applied to the professions-- to accountants, stock brokers, legal representatives, bankers, insurance providers, and so on-- self-regulation was predicated on the belief in long-lasting self-preservation. Rational financial players and moral agents are supposed to optimize their utility in the long-run by observing the rules and regulations of an equal opportunity.

This honorable tendency seemed, alas, to have been tampered by avarice and narcissism and by the immature inability to postpone gratification. Self-regulation failed so marvelously to dominate human nature that its death generated the most invasive statal stratagems ever designed. In both the UK and the USA, the government is much more heavily and pervasively associated with the triviality of accountancy, stock dealing, and banking than it was just 2 years earlier.

However the principles and myth of "order out of mayhem"-- with its supporters in the specific sciences too-- ran deeper than that. The very culture of commerce was thoroughly penetrated and transformed. It is not surprising that the Internet-- a chaotic network with an anarchic method operandi-- grew at these times.

The dotcom revolution was less about technology than about brand-new ways of operating-- mixing umpteen irreconcilable ingredients, stirring well, and expecting the best. No one, for instance, offered a direct income design of how to equate "eyeballs"-- i.e., the number of visitors to a Web site-- to cash ("monetizing"). It was dogmatically held to be true that, unbelievely, traffic-- a chaotic phenomenon-- will equate to benefit-- hitherto the result of painstaking labour.

State owned assets-- including energies and suppliers of public items such as health and education-- were moved http://jaredfngz240.wpsuo.com/7-things-about-liberal-political-platform-your-boss-wants-to-know wholesale to the hands of profit maximizers. The implicit belief was that the price system will provide the missing planning and regulation.

The simultaneous crumbling of these urban legends-- the liberating power of the Net, the self-regulating markets, the unbridled benefits of privatization-- undoubtedly generated a reaction.

The state has acquired monstrous proportions in the years considering that the Second world War. We libertarians-- proponents of both private flexibility and individual duty-- have brought it on ourselves by thwarting the work of that unnoticeable regulator-- the market.