….. is from Matt Ridley’s 2017 Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies titled “Free Markets are Revolutionary, Liberating, and Democratic“:

Things like the English language, made by humankind, but not planned, ordered, constructed or ruled. There is no government, Supreme Court or police force of the English language yet we all obey its laws of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Likewise, the internet is something that evolves; it is not and was not designed, planned or managed.

It is my contention that this concept of spontaneous order is the central idea of the enlightenment, brought to a pinnacle nine years later by Adam Smith with his invisible hand and applied to life itself by Charles Darwin some decades later. If the English language can get along without a government, why do we so quickly assume that English society cannot organize itself?

To labor the point, today in London roughly 10 million people ate lunch. Working out just how much of each type of food to have available in the right places at the right time to ensure that this happened was a problem of mind-boggling complexity, made all the harder by the fact people made up their mind what to eat mostly at the last minute.

Who was in charge of this astonishing feat? Who is London’s lunch commissioner and why does he get so little credit? Why is this system not subsidized? How can it be so lightly regulated?

…………………

The essence of free enterprise is that people become more prosperous by working for each other. The more they abandon self-sufficiency for interdependence, the better off they are. The more they specialize as producers, the more they can diversify as consumers. And what this means, of course, is that networks of exchange and specialization create cooperation, collaboration, and community on an epic scale.

By collaborating through commerce we can do things that are far beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend. Human intelligence is a collective phenomenon, a distributed brain, a cloud. As Leonard Reed famously pointed out, among the thousands of people who contribute to making a simple pencil, not one of them knows how to make a pencil.

True communism, true collectivism, is created by the market, not the state. That the deepest cooperation is what we achieve by buying and selling. It’s time we told the young this. They will never have heard it.