Wrecking the American Dream: The Problem With Today’s Economy
27th June 2024
Our economic leadership often is discussed by way of dollars, but it’s about much more than that. It’s about the well-being of the American people.
The economy has one purpose—to organize our labors to produce the goods and services that households need and desire. After all, the root word of economics refers to the household, which is the foundation of society.
Horseshit.
THE ECONOMY HAS NO PURPOSE. ‘Purpose’ is a notion that applies ONLY to a designed thing, a constructed thing, a thing artificially created by an intelligent agent with a planned end in mind; that planned end is its purpose. One of the most accurate things one can say about a purpose is that it sometimes succeeds but often doesn’t.
The Economy is a self-organizing system that occurs as the result of individual phenomena that may themselves have purpose but the combination of which does not have a purpose. What such systems have are functions, which is ‘what they do’ as opposed to purpose, which is ‘what they are supposed to do’. Hayek and Mises spent their lives writing about this sort of thing, and I encourage you to read what they had to say.
The distinguishing characteristic of self-organizing systems (like The Economy) is that they ‘work’ whether you want them to or not. Thus any politically-motivated interference in such a system (which interference appears to be the theme song of modern politics) always and everywhere has unintended consequences that the interferers (if that isn’t a word, it ought to be) seldom anticipate and are always so surprised to encounter.
So anyone who starts by discussing ‘the purpose of the economy’ is intellectually defective in the same way that people who think that their politically-motivated interference in the economy will do what they want and nothing else are intellectually defective.
Feel free to read the article and agree or disagree with it as the spirit moves you, but bear this essential distinction in mind and take what the author says with a shaker of salt.