Handbook on Contemporary Austrian Economics

148 <strong>Handbook</strong> on contemporary Austrian economics
efficient, than government, is that none of the historical examples we have
of spontaneous social order demonstrate high levels of wealth.
My question is, relative to what Relative to today's highest-performing
governments this is certainly true. But relative to the actual political governance
alternatives these societies faced at the time, it may not be. This is
an empirical question and one that economists should explore rather than
simply announcing the obviousness of the answer without ever considering
the evidence. In any event, when this benchmark is used instead of the
quite irrelevant benchmark of wealth in countries with government today,
even in the worst-case scenario for spontaneous order, the "wealth gap"
between what spontaneous order and government can provide becomes
considerably smaller than that suggested by most of spontaneous order's
critics.
This brings me to the final point I want to make about assessing the
comparative effectiveness of spontaneous order for securing cooperation
vs. using government for this purpose. As noted above, spontaneous
order's critics are happy to point out that all but one of the world's
countries have government. I have already addressed why this observation
doesn't imply what these critics think it does. But much more curiously,
what spontaneous order critics inevitably fail to point out is that among
the approximately 200 countries and thus experiments with government
in the world at the moment, more than half, if evaluated in terms of their
ability to promote social cooperation, must be counted as abject failures.
According to the Foreign Policy/Fund for Peace Failed States Index ,
nearly 14 percent of the world's countries (28) have officially "failing
states" (Failed States Index, 2006 4 ). In them, governments are on the verge
of total collapse. Another 39 percent of the world's countries (78) have
states in imminent danger of failing. This is not exactly a track record to
write home about.
The fact that only a minority of experiments with government actually
produce social order along the lines that spontaneous order's critics
imply government routinely produces has tremendously important, but
totally neglected, implications for evaluating the potential effectiveness
and thus desirability of spontaneous- vs. government-created social order.
Of course, government's failure to effectively produce social order in most
of the world doesn't necessarily mean that spontaneous order would do
any better. But at the very least, the advocates of stat~-created order need
to understand that what they have in mind when discussing the indispensability
of government for wealth and prosperity is in fact a minority
of remarkably successful governments - namely those located in North
America and Western Europe. What they have in mind is the exception,
not the rule.