Liberals see the free market as a kind of optimizer run amuck, a dangerous superintelligence with simple non-human values that must be checked and constrained by the government—the friendly SI. Conservatives just reverse the narrative roles.
I like this analogy. So basically, how do you want to balance the power between your two overlords, one much much smarter than you but with non-human values, and the other much dumber than you but with human (mostly) values.
Who says the state is dumb? It created the market, after all.
What does that mean? Across history, there is a whole spectrum of complexity of both markets and governmental arrangements, and against that backdrop it’s not clear that it means anything to talk about “the state” or “the market”, still less one creating the other. You might as well say that “the market” created “the state”, and I expect that a historian could argue either thesis with equal facility.
And some people would like to make it sit down and write “I will not conjure up what I can’t control” a thousand times for this. But I, for one, welcome our efficient market overlords!
I like this analogy. So basically, how do you want to balance the power between your two overlords, one much much smarter than you but with non-human values, and the other much dumber than you but with human (mostly) values.
Who says the state is dumb? It created the market, after all.
What does that mean? Across history, there is a whole spectrum of complexity of both markets and governmental arrangements, and against that backdrop it’s not clear that it means anything to talk about “the state” or “the market”, still less one creating the other. You might as well say that “the market” created “the state”, and I expect that a historian could argue either thesis with equal facility.
And some people would like to make it sit down and write “I will not conjure up what I can’t control” a thousand times for this. But I, for one, welcome our efficient market overlords!