From: John K Clark (johnkc@well.com)
Date: Sat Sep 27 1997 - 14:07:41 MDT
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On Sat, 27 Sep 1997 Joao Pedro <jpnitya@mail.esoterica.pt> Wrote:
>Most people I met in the Internet say I have an excellent English.
You do, and your English is certainly one hell of a lot better than my
Portuguese!
>Free-markets is not (at least for many people) the best solution
It's easy to dream up something better, the trouble is they're comparing the
free market as it actually is, warts and all, to a mythical command economy
lead by a person who has the following 3 properties:
1) He always knows the right thing to do.
2) He always has the moral courage to actually do it.
3) He always has the leadership skills to get people to do what he wants.
Property 3 is fairly common, a little too common for my taste, moral courage
is very rare and property 1 is nonexistent. Even if you make the very
optimistic assumption that the IQ of a typical politician is larger that his
shoe size, the idea that even a great genius could figure out from first
principles the price an object should be in order to maximize its production
is crazy. But the market will tell you very clearly what the price should be,
no trouble at all.
>if someone disagrees with free-markets he is not necessarily wrong.
True, not necessarily, just very probably. I've never heard of an economic
system that could actually be implemented that worked better than the market
and I doubt that one exists, but I've been wrong before. If somebody comes up
with something better I'd be surprised and absolutely delighted, it would
have beaten the market fair and square in, you guessed it, the free market of
ideas.
John K Clark johnkc@well.com
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