Trust and spontaneous order don’t require heavy hand of the state

By David McElroy · July 25, 2013

What do you do if you want to buy vegetables? If you’re like most people, you head to the grocery store to buy food grown far away from where you live by people you don’t know under conditions you aren’t sure about. What if you had a choice to buy veggies from somebody around the block instead?

Sadly, I don’t eat vegetables the way I should, so I can’t remember the last time I’ve been in the vegetable section of a grocery store unless I was on my way to the meat counter or the ice cream aisle. But if I did suddenly become a healthy eater, I’d have a choice that a lot of people don’t have. I could walk two blocks to the little old house you see above and buy fresh vegetables grown in their yard — all without any licensing or health permits.

I feel pretty certain that this must be against city vending ordinances to do it in a residential area, but this older couple have been doing this since before I moved to the neighborhood more than 20 years ago. They’ve lived there in their modest little house since long before an affluent suburb grew up around them. The mayor of this little suburb lives within 50 yards of the house where these folks live, so I’m sure the city knows about it. Even though my little suburb likes to see itself as progressive and upscale these days, it leaves these people alone. Why? I assume it’s because they’ve been doing it for so long and because the people who live nearby actually like it.

This older couple aren’t going to win any awards for marketing or merchandising displays, but there’s something reassuring and honest about their little operation. I was thinking last night — not for the first time — that what they do is a perfect example of how commerce works when the state doesn’t give orders.

First, nobody tells these people what to grow. If they want to grow tomatoes and green beans and corn, they can do it. If their customers want to buy those things, even better. They don’t have experts telling them what to do. They just know what’s worth their time and effort, because they know local conditions far better than any expert might. (And if they’re wrong, only they will pay the price, but it’s a risk they decide to take.)

Second, nobody tells them the prices or gives them permission to sell. They sell with the permission of their customers. Nobody else.

Third, they trust their customers and their customers trust them. They don’t hire someone to sit at the road and wait next to the cash box. Instead, there’s just a table with the produce and instructions about where to put the money. (See the picture on the right? I took that after midnight Saturday night. The produce is still there, and so is the cash box — with money still inside. I checked.)

The instructions aren’t a model of simplicity or good spelling, but they work. They trust that the customers aren’t going to steal their stuff, and for those who might be thinking about stealing, they have a reminder — on the sign from a couple of years ago — that says, “Thou shall not steal.” At the same time, their customers trust them not to be selling food that’s been poisoned in some way.

Here’s the thing that planners of all stripes don’t understand. We don’t need them forcing their top-down plans on us. There’s nothing wrong with planning. I’m sure the older gentleman who lives near me plans his plowing and seeding each year. The problem is when there’s coercion. Nobody tells him what he has to do — and that’s what state planners are fond of doing.

The Austrian school of economics has been the biggest bastion of support for what’s been called spontaneous order. In this terrific essay from six years ago, economist Russ Roberts says that the great Austrian-school economist Friedrich A. Hayek complained that language is really inadequate at describing processes that emerge without intent ahead of time. Hayek and his fellow Austrians emphasized that it’s not just that the state shouldn’t plan things for people; it’s that the state can’t plan things adequately, because it’s impossible.

(For more on Hayek’s critique of why top-down planning doesn’t work, I recommend his book, “The Fatal Conceit: the Errors of Socialism.”)

Order emerges when people trust each other and pursue their own interests, not when bureaucrats make up rules that seem to make sense to them.

One final point to make is that the story of this older couple in my neighborhood isn’t all about the glories of locally grown food. Honestly, I don’t care much about that. Some people do. The point is that it’s your choice. You can buy your food — when it’s in season — from these nice folks around the block from me or you can buy your food from the Super Target or Winn-Dixie or Publix or Walmart or any of the other dozens of choices near my house. (That’s part of the produce selection at the Target near my house in the picture above.)

The point isn’t that one choice or the other is the better one for you to make. There isn’t a One True Way. The point is that it’s your choice to make. We don’t need the state making it for us, in produce or education or health care or anything else.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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