The current global economic structure does not satisfy the formal conditions that libertarian theory identifiesas constitutive of a free market. This paper extracts those conditions from the tradition's canonical sources:Smith, Ricardo, Bastiat, Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Sowell, Rothbard, Kirzner, Schumpeter, and Rand: andapplies diagnostic tools from cybernetics (Ashby, Beer, Conant-Ashby), information theory (Shannon), andEllul's analysis of technique to determine whether they obtain. The finding: of twenty-nine conditions, noneobtains. The elimination occurred not through external corruption but through the autonomous logic oftechnique: optimisation as supreme criterion: which the tradition itself celebrates. Here lies the tragic paradox:the market's pursuit of its own supreme virtue (efficiency) has, via technique, destroyed the market's ownpreconditions. The structure claiming continuity with the free market tradition has consumed the conditionsthat made markets possible. What remains is not a degraded market but a categorically different system: acomputational command economy operating through nominally private infrastructure: that retains themarket's vocabulary while eliminating its substance.
Moreno Nourizadeh (Mon,) studied this question.
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