Whose Ideas?
It’s been said that good ideas don’t require force – while bad ones rarely get traction without it. True enough. But how about a qualifier?
Whose ideas?
Yours? Mine?
There is a kind of tacitly agreed upon – or at least, rarely questioned – notion that we all agree on what constitutes a “good” idea. It’s the keystone of coercive collectivism, without which that ideology loses moral legitimacy.
But in fact, we don’t agree about what a “good” idea is. Millions of individuals tend to have millions of individually variable ideas about that.
So the question becomes: Whose ideas will prevail?
If there is a free market – in ideas as well as economics – this will sort itself out naturally and non-violently, via the signals of supply and demand. Actually, those two should be reversed. It is demand which determines supply (as well as price).
A question:
Is there market demand for six airbags (and backup cameras and tire pressure inflation sensors and anti-whiplash head restraints, etc.) in every new car?
Wouldn’t it be nice to find out?
Unfortunately, there’s no way to know, because the market – millions of individual people’s freely expressed determinations about what’s “good” – hasn’t been allowed to operate. Instead, a handful of people’s idea that airbags (and the rest of it) are “good” has been imposed on everyone else, on the false presumption that everyone agrees it is good to have six airbags – and many other such things – installed in every new car. This is taken as a kind of collectively agreed upon noggin nodding. That illusion must be maintained, in order for the coercion and collectivism behind it to have any semblance of moral legitimacy.
And yet, it is obviously not legitimate because some noggins aren’t nodding – including mine.
And even if it is just mine.
Morality isn’t democratically determined.
Why should my ideas – or yours – about the “good” of airbags or any other such thing be forced to take a back seat to anyone else’s opposite idea?
That is the moral question at issue. And it goes much deeper than airbags.
It’s interesting to speculate what might be available, car-wise, if individual demand – as opposed to coercive collectivized mandate – were allowed to determine supply.
Actually, we can get a pretty good idea about what would be available, car-wise, if we were free to choose – and if the car industry were free to meet that demand – by looking at other goods which are built to suit individual demand as opposed to coercive collective mandate.
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