the real Road to Serfdom, version 2.0

I used to be a member of the 'Road to Serfdom’ camp back in the 90s and believed any intervention in the marketplace is one more step down a road that we *all* agree ends in a bad place. Since then I came to realize that, although the theories espoused in 'Road to Serfdom' may be sound, they don't translate well into the real world. I came to believe it's not possible for free markets to persist in the real world. Markets don't exist in a vacuum. The world is not only ‘wanters’ and ‘havers’ engaging in commerce. Markets coexist within a framework containing many other systems: Political systems, legal systems, banking systems, religious systems, energy distribution systems, information distribution systems, road systems, international treaty systems, extended family systems, reputation systems, etc, etc. Some of these system are fairly independent of the market system, others intersect and overlap the market system. The reason free markets eventually fail in the real world is that unethical people use elements of these other systems to gain huge, unfair advantages within the market system. Some government intervention is necessary to help prevent or correct these unfair advantages. Of course, government is another system existing within the overall framework and unethical people work hard at manipulating government to gain advantage in one or more of the other systems. It's a big tangled mess of feedback loops that distort any chance for a truly free market to work well in the long term. In fact, I feel these feedback loops, and the opportunities for manipulation they create, cause all the ‘isms’ (capitalism, libertarianism, socialism, communism, egalitarianism, etc) to fail in the long run, if left untended, unregulated.

If nothing works, then what to do? Well, I didn’t say ‘nothing works’, I said ‘nothing works when left untended’. Therefore, what is needed is a society that is diligent in keeping on top of the various systems affecting it, has the tools to monitor these systems, and has the power to do something when corrections are necessary. One that embraces the fact that it will need to continually make adjustments as it goes along. Those adjustments will sometime require an expansion of government to prevent or correct unethical behavior in all the other systems within the framework (including the market system), and sometimes require limiting government to correct abuses or bad government policies. We must always keep in mind that the world is full of flawed people and imperfect systems and know that the *best* we can do is muddle along, but the worst we can do is sit back and trust everything to just work. Faith in the ‘system’ (whatever it is) is the real Road to Serfdom, IMHO.