Change is tough. Societal change, when you have firm views about how society should look, views that have spent decades burrowing ever deeper into your psyche, becomes almost unendurable for some. Hence the use of government as a bludgeon against such forces of change. But change, when it emerges in a spontaneous fashion from the collective forces of voluntary interaction, are beneficial on a scale that we won’t be able to comprehend until a generation or two later. And the very attempt stop the change is like attempting to stop a tsunami. Society itself breaks apart against the rocky shores of comprehensive social crusades as the War on Drugs. Societal change, or increases in liberty, are resisted by those whose wallets will be affected. The recent specter of a plant becoming less prohibited in my home state unleashed a volley of attacks that ultimately failed. An entire political establishment aligned against it, because they knew the implications of letting this small liberty intrude on their prohibitionist party. Probably the largest, most profitable, and most entrenched industry, pharmaceutical, will come crumbling down within a decade due the twin awakenings to marijuana and psychedelics. But I digress.
George Shackle, the only writer I’ve managed, painstakingly, to acquire first editions of every book written, said that “economics isn’t a science, and that we ought not to call it a science”. He posited that social order is one of sudden, kaleidic change, and that professional economists should cease pretending to say anything meaningful about static states or equilibrium in regard to the workings of the economy. Something about Shackle’s whimsical, sphinxlike style of writing is appealing to me (“we are ignorant of what it is we do not know even though we know more than we can ever say”, for instance), but societal change really is kaleidic, and it is best to stay out of its way. A spontaneous order would rather die than be controlled, and no better example of that has been provided by all the attempts at totalitarian socialism, most recently Venezuela, where the citizens have resorted to robbing the local zoos for food, robbing and murdering each other, and generally ripping society apart in an entirely predictable manner.
So it looks like there are two certainties in regards to the outcome of social policies: if voluntarism is protected as an absolute principal, society will always move towards a better state of affairs even if we don’t know what that will look like, while socialism, strictly enforced, will lead to a fracturing of society, all the invisible social bonds that had been taken for granted will be severed. The Benthamite ‘state of nature’ follows soon thereafter.
I’d say I write posts like this to drive home the point that it is impossible to control society, the change is inescapable. I’m talking about market and cultural change that are the result of the spontaneous forces that arise from the plans and voluntary actions and choices of millions of people making billions of decisions and calculations on a daily basis. It’s our duty to prevent the government, or some coalition of offended persons from targeting this type of spontaneous change. Defenders of liberty are in every sense defenders of the spontaneous forces of society. Good luck fitting that into a party platform.
