Tuesday, January 10, 2012

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Market Failure

Institutional apparatuses of violence, aggression and coercion never tire of confiscating the hard-earned profits of entrepreneurs, ordering them to comply with thousands of mutually contradictory regulations, disallowing them to produce a host of commodities that their clients eagerly want to obtain, disadvantaging them by granting subsidies and monopolistic privileges to their corporatist cronies, and branding them traitors of society and inciting others to hate them whenever they attempt to salvage more of the fruits of their labor. And then, having succeeded in breaking their spirits, sapping their energy and killing their charitable instincts, they triumphantly proclaim the long list of things that entrepreneurship and private effort apparently cannot accomplish.

In view of the above, I ask all people of good will to recoil from giving any credence whatsoever to the propaganda of "market failure", "entrepreneurial inefficiency" and "private inadequacy". The ultimate way to prevent the institutional apparatuses of violence from overcoming the collective action problem (and it needs to be admitted that they are very good at it) is to utterly stop believing their mythology and start really acting on this disbelief. The only true reason why a free society might fail is that so many have been brainwashed to believe that it will.

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