Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian approach to economics, was not the first or last thinker to see similarities between a society and a living organism, suggesting the existence of undesigned, spontaneous order. The names Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, before Menger, and Herbert Spencer and F. A. Hayek, after Menger, come to mind.

Ferguson wrote in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), “Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” (Emphasis added.)

The result of human action, but not human design. The importance of this idea cannot be overstated. More than a century after Ferguson’s book, Menger elaborated this unappreciated phenomenon in his Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences (1883).

Undesigned order may be the most counterintuitive idea around, but it is crucial to understanding how free societies work. Trump and his gang don’t get it. Observe that he thinks he knows when the Federal Reserve should cut interest rates or how national trade statistics should look. The price system, of which interest rates are a part, is generated, not by a central plan, but by the countless daily decisions of buyers, sellers, and abstainers acting according to their articulated, unarticulated, and even inarticulable personal information, know-how, preferences, and purposes. That “data” cannot be recorded in a central and accessible place for use by anyone, bureaucrats included. So attempts at conscious government planning will only muck up the price system, along with everything else. A bull in a china shop is an apt image.

If you don’t get this, you don’t get freedom. Unfortunately, unplanned order is, as noted, counterintuitive. People construct some order in their lives, so it’s natural to think that social order must have been designed by the government. That’s a mistake.