“I will commit two billion dollars each year on clean-coal research and development. We will build the demonstration plants, refine the techniques and equipment, and make clean coal a reality.”

That’s what John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, said back on June 18 in Springfield, Missouri. My first reaction was this: “That’s mighty generous of Senator McCain. I didn’t know that he had that kind of money.”

Then I remembered he doesn’t. But if he wins the election next month he’ll have something better: the American taxpayers. In the end, that’s why people run for president of the United States, isn’t it? They have big ideas, so patently sensible and desirable—to their author, that is—that the rest of us must be compelled to go along whether we want to or not.

Isn’t self-government divine?

McCain sees clean-coal technology in our future. But how does he know that’s the way to go? His experts told him. How do they know? They just do. They’re experts.

Either those experts think a real free market (as opposed to the reigning mixed corporatist economy) would develop clean-coal technologies if permitted or they fear it would not and want the government to step in. If it’s the second alternative, we ought to wonder why their preferences should be permitted to override those of the throng whose choices would determine the nature of energy development in a free market.

But if the experts instead believe that clean coal is what the market would select, then they indict themselves on a charge of hubris in the first degree. How can they know what a nonexistent unfettered market process would bring about?

Some years ago Nobel laureate James Buchanan rightly criticized a strain of “free-market” thinking which holds that, in principle, an omniscient being could anticipate the outcomes the market process would produce. Wrong, Buchanan said, for that would imply that the market aims at outcomes external to itself, and such a view betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what markets do.

For Buchanan, “[T]he ‘order’ of the market emerges only from the process of voluntary exchange among the participating individuals. The ‘order’ is, itself, defined as the outcome of the process that generates it. The ‘it,’ the allocation-distribution result, does not, and cannot, exist independently of the trading process. . . .”

In other words, human beings do not robotically execute plans formulated in some Platonic realm separate from their day-to-day world. On the contrary, “They confront genuine choices. . . . The potential participants do not know until they enter the process what their own choices will be.”

Human beings are not program-bound computers. They are persons on the Misesian model: creative entrepreneurial beings facing an open-ended world in which genuine surprise is possible.

“From this it follows,” concludes Buchanan, “that it is logically impossible for an omniscient designer to know, unless, of course, we are to preclude individual freedom of will.”

This overlooked function of the market means that competition is more than a “discovery procedure,” to use F. A. Hayek’s phrase. The market doesn’t merely discover what’s there waiting to be discovered, like someone’s discovering an island. Rather, the market process creates what it “discovers” by virtue of being an environment in which freely choosing individuals do things in particular situations that they might never have anticipated doing had they not faced those situations. And remember, those situations themselves are the product of people’s making unanticipated choices in earlier situations, and so on ad infinitum.

In light of this radical perspective on the free market, we are entitled to ask: If an omniscient being couldn’t know if clean coal is the best choice, how can McCain and his experts know? Laissez faire, laissez passer.

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Virtually everyone thinks America must become energy independent. It’s something even opposing presidential candidates agree on. Be careful what you ask for, says David Henderson.

And speaking of oil, are speculators to blame for the run-up in gasoline prices? Are oil companies sitting on lands that could be producing more barrels? Robert Murphy brings some economic sense to the place where demagogues dwell.

Social Security, being a government program, stands on two frauds: that our “contributions” are invested and that our bosses match those “contributions.” As J. R. Clark and Dwight Lee show, we’ve been had.

Should people have to speak English before they can live in the United States? Becky Akers says such a requirement would violate the original American spirit.

In the pantheon of liberty’s champions, none stands taller than Richard Cobden, who explicitly connected free trade, anti-imperialism, and peace. Edward Stringham pens a well-deserved tribute.

“Progressive” cities promised free wireless Internet services to their residents. How’d things work out? Not well, Steven Titch writes.

Our regular contributors have been toiling to produce these columns: Lawrence Reed gets an early start celebrating Bill of Rights Day. Robert Higgs explains how the Great Depression really ended. Thomas Szasz warns of the metaphor trap. John Stossel inveighs against the “drug war.” Charles Baird strikes a blow for workers’ freedom. And Lawrence White, encountering the claim that only government can stabilize banking and finance, ripostes, “It Just Ain’t So!”

Our book reviewers have immersed themselves in volumes about Ludwig von Mises, “capitalism,” phony medicine, and antitrust law.

We wrap up with Capital Letters about the Constitution and voting.

—Sheldon Richman
srichman@fee.org