mleku on Nostr: i'm not sure that's correct. Adam Smith's "hidden hand" is an early example of the ...

i'm not sure that's correct. Adam Smith's "hidden hand" is an early example of the intuition towards systems theory and emergent phenomena. these days there seems to be an awful lot of people trying to make out that free markets are some kind of fantasy or something when the empirical data exists of markets without regulation that function just fine. the silk road didn't get named that for nothing, it's because the silk road was an anarchic trade network that emerged in west asia in spite of efforts by china to stop people selling the local specialty abroad. the thing that destroys free markets is extortion. taxation. tribute. the historical record is very clear about this. the tax collector becomes your ticket to join the market. if you get accused of evading taxes, you can't trade. the mark of the beast is literally exactly taxation it's not something new at all.