The point with liberalism is that value is displayed in exchange, it is not a distinction awarded through rationally organized evaluation. The market does not “reward”, the market chooses. Taking it as a reward is a metaphorical exercise that confuses everything.
And why do we have to opt for the election instead of the jury? Because for the purposes of survival and satisfaction it is the best option: it does not require violence, society is ordered through elections, generating a spontaneous order that has been explained many times. It is the same reason why language is not organized rationally. In that sense, there is no “right choice”, the right thing is the choice.
The market is far from being a meritocracy that requires a criterion to measure it. The market is itself the criterion of value. And this goes far beyond economics. The economic market is not the model from which these ideas are derived; It’s the other way around. The market is just a particular case, a manifestation in the area of scarce goods, of a more general principle: a society is ordered through free elections of its members. We study the economic market because there the consequences are measurable and observable, but the principle applies to the entire social order.
The spontaneous order allows moral dogmas to be questioned and even overthrown, such as the submission of women, sexual repression, physical punishment or the stake. The bonfire, in reality, is more similar to a meritocracy than the market. Any type of pre-established hierarchy is a form of meritocracy.
In controlled environments and with precise objectives, meritocracy can work: an exam, an artistic award, recognition of any kind. It will always be discussed, it will always depend on how much effort has been made to give it credibility, and at some point it will be discretionary. The market skips that difficulty. It is based on the assumption that the election is sufficient proof and the result is always greater productivity, because each actor follows his goals, therefore he has incentives to act. That is why there is no need for violence or audits.
Milei, without understanding what this matter is about, once said at a meeting of his ideological group in Mexico that the businessman earned more than the employee because he worked more hours, following Karl Marx in the theory of value based on the cost of production with which he built his theory of exploitation. There is no such rule, nor does the employer necessarily work more than the employee or even necessarily earn more. Marx, and his libertarian disciple, were wrong.
Both the employer and the employee gain more if what they do is chosen with a higher degree of priority than other options. The ability to be favored by the choice of others is the advantage. The employee by someone who takes all his time and the entrepreneur taking risks while waiting for that choice. If the rule is the freedom to choose, there will be more business, there will be more resources, everyone will be willing to do more and see how they reduce costs to become more competitive.
But to speak of “merit” here would be a mistake. The ability to satisfy other people’s preferences is not a merit in any robust sense of the term. Merit requires a yardstick, a criterion that someone must establish and defend. Why would a tennis player with natural talent have more “merit” than another who trains twenty hours a day but does not reach the same level? He doesn’t have it. It is simply chosen by more people to watch play. Talking about merit here is not only useless but confusing: it surreptitiously introduces the idea that there is an external evaluation criterion, when precisely what I maintain is that there is none and there should be none. There is a choice, period. When you choose a partner, there is no merit. That person does not have “the merit of having been elected.” She was simply chosen. The language of merit belongs to systems with juries and committees; the market and the spontaneous order dispense with it.
This does not prevent each person from making their value judgments about themselves and others. That is inseparable from his choice, but he cannot transfer it to others nor is there a central expert committee that can supplant his judgment. No matter how hard you try, you would always be left behind, as would happen to a central word-creating command or what happened to Soviet pricing organizations. It’s the same principle.
The underlying question is: how are moral norms, valid ways of life, and shared values determined? The alternative to spontaneous order is always some form of central moral committee, with the problems already mentioned: corruption of power, absence of legitimate criteria of evaluation, destruction of incentives for action and the pursuit of happiness. Any committee that sought to determine what combination of choices is optimal for society would face intractable problems: it would corrupt its power, generate endless controversy, and be suboptimal for many by definition. The question “suboptimal for whom?” reveals the problem: there is no objective social utility function, there are just people choosing.
Here I am not talking about economic externalities or monopolies in markets for scarce goods, where there are evidently debates outside this analysis on regulation. I’m talking about the area of values, personal preferences, ways of life: there is no shortage there. If I choose to sleep with a man, I don’t take away anyone’s chance to sleep with a woman. If I do not adopt a religious belief, I do not consume a finite resource that another needs. The typical objections to economic markets do not apply in this area because there is no competition for limited resources. What there is is multiplicity without subtraction. And in multiplicity there is information and free verification to facilitate other people’s choices, not social cost.
This leaves aside all conservative attempts at things such as maintaining “Western values” or a “culture of our own.” Because, let’s think about it, if a culture has to resist our choices, it’s not ours in the first place. If Western values are threatened by Western citizens, they are not Western values. The point is, in reality, that a conservatism of this style wants to be the police of elections that do not resemble its own, to establish itself as a moral judge with discretionary power. It implies little confidence in one’s own elections, on the other hand.
History shows it clearly. Let’s think about contemporary examples: family forms—single-parent, joint, same-sex—were not “approved” by any committee of family experts. They emerged from individual choices, and the ethical discussion ran behind, adapting. Those who wanted to “defend the traditional family” through laws were trying to be that moral central committee, and they lost because people’s actual elections showed that those ways worked.
Or let’s think about language: no one designed emojis, memes, the language of the internet. They emerged spontaneously from millions of interactions. Any attempt by a Digital Language Ministry to create something like this would fail, because it would already be obsolete by the time it published its standards.
Whenever these pretentious appeals are heard, two things are verified. The first is that the natural evolution of the concrete choices of people who play their values by exchanging and collaborating, exceeds the capacity of the central moral committee and generates ethically valuable changes that perplex those who want to stop them, such as the cases mentioned, to which one could add the end of slavery, the end of censorship, torture and a long list of things that used to be Western values. The second thing that is verified is that the moral police are more similar to the Argentine highway police than to the Finnish police. It’s part of the business: he who has the discretionary power to judge, escapes from being judged with the same criteria. The owner of the rod uses it to his advantage.
A corollary of these principles is equality before the law, which can be difficult to define. The Argentine Court once conceptualized it as treating equally those who were in an equal situation, but for the purposes of this comment, I would say that it means that no choice is worth more than another. Everyone who can choose is an equal. The choice has value regardless of how much merit is assigned to it with whatever criteria are used by the person who chooses.
And this is so more than for an ethical reason or as a constitutional pact for the system of free choice to survive: it is that the entire framework is based on the basis that choosing is useful, not that there is an external criterion to determine what should be chosen. It is trusting more in spontaneous order and experience than in the arbitrariness of an authority.
Hayek also proposed that competition, and we could extend this to free choice in general, is a procedure of discovery. We do not know in advance what will work, what will best meet needs, what ways of life will generate the most flourishing. Only by choosing, risking, experimenting, we discover it. That is why any attempt to evaluate ex ante what deserves to be chosen is doomed to failure: the information we need only emerges from the process of choosing itself.
Ethics subsists as thought and reflection, but it will always be a little behind, feeding on what results, on the climate of the time, on how much happiness is the output of interaction, on the experiences of others, those of those who risk deviating from public judgment and teach with their success or failure. Progress is experience and reflection, but experience requires freedom. There are firmer conclusions in history, such as not killing, and others that are somewhat more complex and advanced, such as leaving violence aside, directly. From not being watched by the Gestapo to not being intimidated by a digital gang.
Because just as the entire edifice depends on free and open elections, without interference, as a general rule for everyone and with responsibility for their own actions, what everyone chooses, ultimately, is to be better and seek happiness, as the Declaration of Independence of the United States says. If value emerges from what is chosen, and we all choose to pursue happiness, then the system that maximizes free choices is the one that maximizes the possibilities of human flourishing.
Are there wrong choices? Obviously there are, but that is demonstrated ex post. We almost never anticipate success, because otherwise we would all have it available. Therefore, limiting elections according to external judgment, declaring them a “cultural battle”, is completely meaningless.
As Hayek wrote, Freedom is valuable not because it guarantees us choosing well, but because it allows us to discover what it means to choose well. And that discovery is collaborative, gradual, never definitive. It is a process, not a destination. Those who seek to stop it in the name of eternal values are, in reality, betting against the human capacity to learn, adapt and flourish. They are, deep down, against life itself.
by José Benegas
