I’m Coming Over All Green

A great quotation from Steven Landsburg published on Café Hayek yesterday:

Even without any formal organization, markets tend to develop precisely because they are such powerful tools for improving everyone’s welfare.

Today we are everywhere enjoined to respect the delicate ecological balance of nature, in which each creature is so miraculously designed to fill its special niche, and in which each part interacts in glorious intricacy with the whole.  Let us save some respect too for the equally delicate structure of the marketplace, which routinely accomplishes feats that even nature dares not attempt.

A society is probably the most complex eco-system known. It is as complex as the needs and desires of every single individual in it, needs and desires that can only be worked out on the level of the individual, not in aggregate - meaning it is not accessible to a central planner - to achieve the voluntary, spontaneous order that free, laissez faire markets give us. Never perfect, how can it be, but it will always be the best system there is philosophically (first), economically, and thus politically. It is the only system that works toward both the freedom, and living standards, of each of us. The only system. And so to try and put this system, which nurtures human lives, into terms those chief architects of its destruction would understand; driving the bulldozer of government regulation, with the jack-hammer of taxation gouging out endeavour, into this delicate system of human welfare, is like doing this to a landscape:

It’s not surprising, therefore, that I have a dream, of seeing one of these:

Marching on parliament, not to close down mining, such as the mining in Australia, where 1,000 Kiwis a week are now fleeing to for jobs, but to save the markets that sustain us, and could grow us those jobs here. And that's as easy as asking the politicians to step out of markets: just sit up there in the hive, eat their lunch, and try to do as little as possible. Please.