In Praise of Spontaneous Order

There are nearly six million people in metro Atlanta. Six million. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. But if you drive around town, you’ll notice there aren’t any farms or cattle ranches within the city limits. So how do all these people get fed every day? Who plans it all out? I mean, let’s face it: here are six million individuals who would easily die in a few days if suppliers stopped driving and flying into the city to satisfy its endless wants and needs.

So try to imagine all that goes into keeping Atlanta fed. Try to comprehend the millions upon millions of complex transactions that take place every day between farmers, distributors, manufacturers throughout north Georgia and the Southeast, the companies that insure these manufacturers, the truckers, the people that build the trucks, grocery stores, the people that put the air conditioning in the grocery stores, restaurants, etc., all in effort to keep Atlantans fat and happy. There’s a seemingly endless intricate list of things that will all have to occur tomorrow so all six million people don’t descend into mass rioting, looting, starvation, and mass chaos. And yet no one in the city is frightened by this prospect. To the contrary, most Atlantans are peacefully sound asleep as I type this.

So what makes this great marvel of economic cooperation succeed so well every day? There’s no central government planning authority downtown tasked with calling all the thousands of farmers/distributors to make sure all of this goes through like it’s supposed to, and even if there were it would be simply impossible for such a bureaucracy to even fathom attempting to clumsily coordinate all the processes that would have to occur and to try and put them in motion. So what makes all of this stuff happen? How do producers calculate exactly what, where, when, and how much to supply? How do millions of complete strangers every day coordinate with a million other complete strangers to get that chili cheese dog and fries to you at the Varsity right when you want it? The answer is simple. Markets. Prices. The profit incentive. In two words: "spontaneous order," driven by economic freedom.

And yet there are those in Washington who are unappreciative, ignorant, and unaware of these billions of unseen connections that make our society so dynamic, so prosperous, and so wealthy. They instead seek to stifle the very incentives that hold this immensely elaborate system together, calling for more government intervention, taxation, controls and "planning." At least 48% of the country praises the likes of these planners. I fear them.

"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance." - Murray N. Rothbard