Portal:Capitalism/Selected quote/53

“ Now the remarkable fact is not how much the government does to control economic activity-tariff legislation, pure-food laws, utility and railroad regulations, minimum-wage regulations, fair-labor-practive acts, social security, price ceilings and floors, public works, national defense, national and local taxation, police protection and judicial redress, zoning ordinances, municipal water or gas works, etc.-but how much it does not do, even in time of war when controls multiply. Hundreds of thousands of commodities are produced by millions of people more or less at their own volition without central direction or master plan.

In a system of free enterprise no individual or organization is consciously concerned with the triad of economic problems discussed in Chap. 2. This is really remarkable. To paraphrase a famous economic example, consider the city of New York. Without a constant flow of goods in and out of the city, in a week it would be on the verge of starvation. More than a variety of right kinds and amounts of food is involved; from the surrounding hinterland, from 48 states, and form the far corners of the world, goods have been travelling for days and months with New York City as their destination. All this is undertaken without coercion or centralized direction by any conscious body!

How is it that 7 million people are able to sleep easy at night without living in mortal terror of a breakdown in the elaborate economic processes upon which the city's existence depends?

This alone is convincing proof that a competitive system of markets and prices-whatever else it may be, however imperfectly it may function-is not a system of chaos and anarchy. There is in it a certain order and orderliness. It works. It functions. Without intelligence it solves one of the most complex problems imaginable, involving thousands of unknown variables and relations. Nobody designed it. Like Topsy it just grew, and like human nature, it is changing; but at least it meets the first test of any social organization-it is changing; but at least it meets the first test of any social organization-it is able to survive.

” — Paul Samuelson (1915 – 2009)
Economics: The Original 1948 Edition