… is from pages 65-66 of Johan Norberg’s excellent 2023 book, The Capitalist Manifesto:
The free market is based on Socratic wisdom – that the most important thing is to be aware of what we do not know. We do not know which ideas offer the most productive innovations or are the best solutions to our problems. We know that we have not yet come up with the best ways to teach students, cure illnesses, organize family life, insure against risk, produce food, or make a cappuccino. We only know that the chance of finding ever better methods is greater if everyone is allowed to join in the search.
DBx: Yes.
In a contrast that couldn’t be more stark, advocates of overriding market signals and competition with government-decreed allocations of resources – that is, advocates of all such interventions from full-on socialism to protectionism – ask us to have faith that they, these advocates, already have somehow accurately determined which is the best mix of outputs to produce and how best to produce this mix. Never, of course, do these socialists or industrial-policyists or protectionists reveal to us the source of their amazing knowledge. We are simply told that we must accept it on faith. And if we refuse to swallow this faith, we are accused – astonishingly – of being benighted dogmatists when we point to a well-established theory that does explain how dispersed knowledge is accessed and used by market processes to tend to channel resources from less-valuable to more-valuable uses.
