Imagine that a new university has been built, and you are on the committee charged with laying out the sidewalks. What would you do?
Baseball teams are judged on wins and losses, and firms in the marketplace are “judged” by profits and losses. Since performance is objective, there is far more pressure on participants to put aside their prejudices and personal preferences.
If nuclear power is cheap, clean, and efficient, of course, that spells trouble for traditional fossil fuel producers and users.
Will large, vertically integrated firms as we have known them disappear?
The division of labor can be cultivated in a setting with no history of prosperity, and highly productive specialization can be fostered even in people who have no special knowledge or abilities at the outset.
Conventions exist when people all agree on a rule of behavior, even if no one ever said the rule out loud or wrote it down.
Society is much closer to a complex biological organism than to a matrix of engineering principles with explicit, contingent rules.
It is quite true that a standard bilateral fee-for-service arrangement would fail to provide enough lighthouses — at first. But that failure would have consequences.
Twenty years from now, people will look back at our current practices of exclusive ownership and storage with bewilderment. They will wonder what life was like before platforms made our lives richer, better, and less wasteful.
Few defenders of free markets, not even the oft-maligned Ayn Rand, can be read as defending greed. In fact, if greed or selfishness is understood as exploiting others, then greed is impossible in a system of voluntary exchange.