… is from page 15 of Paul Seabright’s excellent 2004 book, The Company of Strangers:
Citizens of the industrialized market economies have lost their sense of wonder at the fact that they can decide spontaneously to go out in search of food, clothing, furniture, and thousands of other useful, attractive, frivolous, or life-saving items, and that when they do so, somebody will have anticipated their actions and thoughtfully made such items available for them to buy. For our ancestors who wandered the plains in search of game, or scratched the earth to grow grain under a capricious sky, such a future would have seemed truly miraculous, and the possibility that it might come about without the intervention of any overall controlling intelligence would have seemed incredible.
DBx: I say again to those who doubt that free markets are genuine and that these markets work wonders for ordinary people: Step into a modern American supermarket and behold the cornucopia before your eyes! Every item – each of the nearly 50,000 goods – is priced such that you can purchase it easily. Think of all the efforts of the countless strangers who daily work to make this cornucopia available to you. What prompts them to perform these great services? And what guides them to perform these services in ways that are genuinely useful to you and other strangers?
You have a soul of vinegar or a mind of mud if you are not in awe of the glorious human cooperation spontaneously achieved by market processes.
