The Legendary Dragon Alephwyr, named Alephwyr, BA

When they say the market is optimal what they really mean is that its logic is comprehensive and all-encompassing, not that it's good. This is a pretty big equivocation. I like markets. But spiritually, a market is quantified existentialism: nihilism + subjectivity + will = $$$

But it's not even that, because there's no mechanism in markets to distinguish authenticity or to weed out bad faith, so fundamentally performance winds up being equivalent to if not superior to authenticity via intersubjective pseudo-consensus.

People converge on strategically useful fakeness and it becomes the coin of the realm. I know this isn't news to anyone paying attention, but it's frustrating.

Vaclav Havel wrote about the challenges of "Living in Truth" under a post-totalitarian regime, but post-totalitarianism is inefficient and suboptimal: So it creates vacuums that can be filled, illicitly or not. Markets are totalizing, but it is not authenticity they totalize.

The libertarian belief in "true markets" is an attempt to rectify concepts of freedom, hence authenticity secondarily, with markets. To a libertarian, a totalized market would axiomatically/exactly correspond to all true demands and preferences as weighted by economic contingency