Wednesday, August 03, 2016

Progress is NEVER inevitable...

One of the most obvious errors regularly committed by right wing thinkers of the libertarian sort is the assumption that ‘free’ markets inevitably lead to prosperity. If they did, they would not be free at all, would they? 

This is exactly the kind of teleological thinking these sophists mock the likes of Marx for. Yet free markets no more lead to inevitable economic progress than natural selection leads to intelligent life. 

Free markets are in fact just as prone to errors, to marching up cul-de-sacs as Nature is. There might be a greater underlying probability of positive consequences over negative ones, but the term free by its very nature implies that you get some sort of mixture of the two. 

It goes without saying too that nature's system for correcting mistakes is generally not considered apt for economic predicaments. So, this is why we have governments. 



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