The context is some argument between Marc Andreesen and an Alex Payne which appears to be a proxy in the evergreen contest between free markets and rent-seeking government control.
Wilson's final paragraph is a succinct clear statement of the central issue, the sight of which is often lost in heated arguments.
Negotiating tradeoffs is hard. It's made much easier when we remember that the economic puzzle isn't how to maximize the welfare of one class of people (particularly at the expense of another), but to discover those technologies and institutions that better permit people to engage in mutually beneficial, peaceful, consensual production and exchange. The economic puzzle is how to maximize cooperation.The marketplace is a forum for clearing near infinite amounts of information and near infinite amounts of individual desires. When lightly policed to prevent monopoly, rent-seeking and regulatory capture, it is one of the most amazing mechanisms for maximizing human freedom of choice and clearly far and away the best means of fostering human prosperity and well-being. It is amazing to me that there are any people out there who think that centrally controlled, less free economies are a better means of achieving societal well-being than free markets.
For forty years after World War II India and China pursued economic models that were predicated on control and centralized expertise. Those that weren't already in poverty fell into it under these models. Then they began to adopt more market based models (China sooner and more enthusiastically than India) and in the subsequent thirty years some 500 million have been lifted out of poverty.
Free markets are not the be-all-and-end-all of good governance but they are the necessary predicate for prosperity and almost always are a harbinger, sooner or later, of greater freedom. Free markets without democracy tend to self-correct towards greater freedom. Controlled markets even with democracy default towards totalitarianism.
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