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The dispute between the market order and socialism is no less than a matter of survival. To follow socialist morality would destroy much of present humankind and impoverish much of the rest.
the astonishing fact, revealed by economics and biology, that order generated without design can far outstrip plans men consciously contrive.
norms that I believe embody a naive and uncritical theory of rationality, an obsolete and unscientific methodology that I have elsewhere called ‘constructivist rationalism’
for the notion that, in the last resort, the whole debate is a matter of value judgements and not of facts has prevented professional students of the market order from stressing forcibly enough that socialism cannot possibly do what it promises.
David Hume’s insight that ‘the rules of morality . . . are not conclusions of our reason’
our values and institutions are determined not simply by preceding causes but as part of a process of unconscious self-organisation of a structure or pattern.
formation of complex structures in terms of processes transcending our capacity to observe all the several circumstances operating in the determination of their particular manifestations.
one of the most influential political movements of our time, socialism, is based on demonstrably false premises, and despite being inspired by good intentions and led by some of the most intelligent representatives of our time, endangers the standard of living and the life itself of a large proportion of our existing population.
In the seventh chapter, I turn to our language, to show how it has been debased under socialist influence and how careful we must be to keep ourselves from being seduced by it into socialist ways of thinking.
Our moral traditions, like many other aspects of our culture, developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product. Surprising and paradoxical as it may seem to some to say this, these moral traditions outstrip the capacities of reason.
When words lose their meaning people will lose their liberty. Confucius
socialist writers. The more closely one scrutinises their work, the more clearly one sees that they have contributed far more to the preservation than to the reformation of animistic thought and language.
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind. For this socialism deserves a place in an authoritative inventory of the various forms of animism
This is the key error in thinking. The key mistake from which other errors are derived.
or theories about consequences or causes of alleged facts.
To Marx especially we also owe the substitution of the term ‘society’ for the state or compulsory organisation about which he is really talking, a circumlocution that suggests that we can deliberately regulate the actions of individuals by some gentler and kinder method of direction than coercion.
society
The unsatisfactory character of our contemporary vocabulary of political terms results from its descent largely from Plato and Aristotle who, lacking the conception of evolution, considered the order of human affairs as an arrangement of a fixed and unchanging number of men fully known to the governing authority – or, like most religions down to socialism, as the designed product of some superior mind.
socialists in their appropriation of the term ‘liberalism’. As Joseph A. Schumpeter rightly put it (1954:394): ‘As a supreme if unintended compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label.’
Since this term suggests a system serving the special interests of the owners of capital, it naturally provoked the opposition of those who, as we have seen, were its main beneficiaries, the members of the proletariat. The proletariat was enabled by the activity of owners of capital to survive and increase, and was in a sense actually called into being by them. It is true that owners of capital made the extended order of human intercourse possible, and this might have led to some capitalists proudly accepting that name for the result of their efforts. It was nevertheless an unfortunate
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The term Capitalism was created as a response to socialism, but it is an unfortunate label since it suggests a clash of interests between those with capital and those without capital that simply doesn't exist in the system the term is said to represent.
It is necessary to be constantly reminded that the economy the market produces is not really like products of deliberate human design but is a structure which, while in some respects resembling an economy, in other regards, particularly in not serving a unitary hierarchy of ends, differs fundamentally from a true economy.
These terms are particularly attractive because the classical Greek word from which they stem, katalattein or katalassein, meant not only ‘to exchange’ but also ‘to receive into the community’ and ‘to turn from enemy into friend’, further evidence of the profound insight of the ancient Greeks in such matters (Liddell and Scott, 1940, s.v. katallasso). This led me to suggest that we form the term catallaxy to describe the object of the science we generally call economics, which then, following Whately, itself ought to be called catallactics.
The proper term of economics and capitalism.
