Politicians have big plans for us.
President Joe Biden repeatedly says, “I have a plan for that.”
“I alone can fix it,” shouted President Donald Trump.
But most of life, and the best of life, happens when politicians butt out and let us make our own choices.
Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou called that “spontaneous order.” Thousands of years later, economist F. A. Hayek added that order comes “not from design, but spontaneously.”
Did you eat a banana this morning? No central planner calculates how many bananas should be grown, who will pick them, when they’ll be harvested, how they’ll be shipped, or how many to ship. We get bananas and most everything in life through billions of individuals, planning, cooperating, and reacting on their own.
“Think about spontaneous order on a road,” says The Atlas Network’s Tom Palmer.
Right. Millions of people, some of them morons, propel 4,000-pound vehicles at 60 miles per hour, right next to each other. We rarely smash into each other.
There are rules, like “pass on the left,” but for the most part, people navigate highways on their own.
Likewise, no one invented language, but the world has thousands. “Experts” tried to invent better ones, like Volapuk and Esperanto, which supposedly would let us communicate better.
“No one speaks these languages,” says Palmer, because language evolves spontaneously. “That is always superior to top-down systems that rely on the information in one brain.”
Amazingly, my town, New York City, has twice now allowed spontaneous order that makes my life much better.
City government once managed Central Park. When it did, trash was everywhere, and most of the grass was dead.
The city then agreed to let a private nonprofit, the Central Park Conservancy, manage most of the park. Without a government plan, people came together, giving money and time to turn the park around. (Disclosure: I was one of them, and now I’m a conservancy director.)
Now Central Park is beautiful. Forty million people spend time there every year. Despite the crowds, the park works well without strict government rules.
Hellbound and Down 