An important passage from Chapter 3 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty:
“…where we rely on spontaneous ordering forces we shall often not be able to foresee the particular changes by which the necessary adaptation to altered external circumstances will be brought about, and sometimes perhaps not even be able to conceive in what manner the restoration of a disturbed ‘equilibrium’ or ‘balance’ can be accomplished. This ignorance of how the mechanism of the spontaneous order will solve such a ‘problem’ which we know must be solved somehow if the overall order is not to disintegrate, often produces a panic-like alarm and the demand for government action for the restoration of the disturbed balance.
Often it is even the acquisition of a partial insight into the character of the spontaneous overall order that becomes the cause of the demands for deliberate control. So long as the balance of trade, or the correspondence of supply and demand of any particular commodity, adjusted itself spontaneously after any disturbance, men rarely asked themselves how this happened. But, once they became aware of the necessity of such constant readjustments, they felt that somebody must be made responsible for deliberately bringing them about. The economist, from the very nature of his schematic picture of the spontaneous order, could counter such apprehension only by the confident assertion that the required new balance would establish itself somehow if we did not interfere with the spontaneous forces; but, as he is usually unable to predict precisely how this would happen, his assertions were not very convincing. Yet when it is possible to foresee how the spontaneous forces are likely to restore the disturbed balance, the situation becomes even worse. The necessity of adaptation to unforeseen events will always mean that someone is going to be hurt, that someone’s expectations will be disappointed or his efforts frustrated. This leads to the demand that the required adjustment be brought about by deliberate guidance, which in practice must mean that authority is to decide who is to be hurt. The effect of this is often that necessary adjustments will be prevented whenever they can be foreseen.
What helpful insight science can provide for the guidance of policy consists in an understanding of the general nature of the spontaneous order, and not in any knowledge of the particulars of a concrete situation, which it does not and cannot possess.
It is not to be denied that to some extent the guiding model of the overall order will always be an Utopia, something to which the existing situation will be only a distant approximation and which many people will regard as wholly impractical. Yet it is only by constantly holding up the guiding conception of an internally consistent model which could be realized by the consistent application of the same principles, that anything like an effective framework for a functioning spontaneous order will be achieved. Adam Smith thought that ‘to expect, indeed, that freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain is as absurd as to expect an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it.’14 Yet seventy year later, largely as a result of his work, it was achieved.”
I post these long quotes because we must understand not only what we are against, but what we are for. We are for the expansion of choice, of the complete legalization of every voluntary interaction among consenting adults. This will have the affect of unleashing Hayek’s “spontaneous forces”, or Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”, which means nothing more than that society will solve the economic problem by rapidly correcting mistakes, such as poverty, black markets, etc. Prosperity will take hold, and society as a whole will dramatically improve. But we can’t predict exactly how it will improve. We only know that it will. And the fact that the changes will be unpredictable will be unsettling to some, some who would rather use the organized control of the State to alter or prevent that change. But society should be allowed to evolve. If the evolution emerges in an undesigned fashion from entirely voluntary behavior, then it is an evolution that we needed, although we didn’t know it. This of course all makes perfect sense to me, in the middle of the night.
