The Conditions of the Invisible Hand III: The Horizon Mismatch

This is the third paper in The Conditions of the Invisible Hand, a critical examination of contemporary economic configurations and the libertarian tradition's defence of them. Paper I (Free Markets Without Markets) established that the formal conditions extracted from the libertarian tradition's canonical sources do not obtain in the documented record of the contemporary Western economy. Paper II (The Ricardian Inversion) traced the historical dismantling of the boundary conditions Ricardo's comparative-advantage theorem depended upon, and demonstrated that the Chinese economic configuration satisfies more of those boundary conditions than the contemporary Western configuration does. The present paper develops the temporal-architectural mechanism that explains why both configurations have arrived at their current condition, and why the libertarian tradition's analytical apparatus, applied rigorously to either, closes positions the tradition's contemporary defenders would prefer to keep open.