…the [...] assumption that we live in a free-market world is simply not true. In fact, it is sheer fantasy. How is it that journalists can continually get away with asserting that the fantasy is true? How can informed writers continue to fob off on us the idea that we live in a laissez-faire world that can only be improved by just a bit of public tinkering?

The reason is that most of our daily experience in life is not with the Department of Labor or Interior or Education or Justice. It is with Home Depot, McDonald’s, Kroger, and Pizza Hut. Our lives are spent dealing with the commercial sector mostly, because it is visible and accessible, whereas the depredations of the state are mostly abstract, and its destructive effects mostly unseen. We don’t see the inventions left on the shelf, the products not imported due to quotas, the people not working because of minimum wage laws, etc.

Because of this, we are tempted to believe the unbelievable, namely that government serves the function only of a night watchman. And only by believing in such a fantasy can we possibly believe the second assumption, which is that the problems of our society are due the to the market economy, not to the government that has intervened in the market economy.
[...]
Let’s move to the [...] assumption that government intervention can solve social and economic problems, with global warming at the top of the heap. Let’s say that we remain agnostic on the question of whether there is global warming and what the cause really is (there is no settled answer to either issue, despite what you hear). The very idea that putting the government in charge of changing the weather of the next 100 years is another notion from fantasy land.

The point about complexity counts against government intervention, not for it. The major contribution of F.A. Hayek to social theory is to point out that the social order — which extends to the whole of the world — is far too complicated to be managed by bureaus, but rather depends on the decentralized knowledge and decisions of billions of market actors. In other words, he gave new credibility to the insight of the classical liberals that the social order is self-managing and can only be distorted by attempts to centrally plan. Planning, ironically, leads to social chaos.¹

1. Jeffrey A. Tucker – How Free Is the “Free Market”? [↩]