Nick's new page

Nick Davis Chorlton Manchester United Kingdom

Well, the last updated web page was, erm, December 1995

A lot has happened since then:

• Nedra and I were married
• My computer wiz brother set up a devilishly professional website
• Free Life went on-line
• Rodney became a student teacher
• Barry set up a groovy site and promptly moved to the USA
• Even my mum became a net-head
• And the Conservative Party were rather decimated at the polls

Favorite Links

• one
• two
• Leonard Read's I Pencil
• solutions for all your legal problems
• Libertarian Alliance who introduced me to the ideas back in '86. Three cheers for Chris and Brian!
• The York crew
• The Libertarian Web

Food for thought

The enemies of liberty have always based their arguments on the contention that order
in human affairs requires that some should give orders and others obey. Much of the
opposition to a system of freedom under general laws arises from the inability to conceive
of an effective coordination of human activities without deliberate organisation by a
commanding intelligence. One of the achievements of economic theory has been to
explain how such a mutual adjustment of the spontaneous activities of individuals is
brought about by the market, provided there is a known delimitation of the sphere of
control of each individual [i.e. property rights]. An understanding of that mechanism
of mutual adjustment of individuals forms the most important part of the knowledge
that ought to enter into the making of general rules limiting individual action.

The orderliness of social activity shows itself in the fact that the individual can carry
out a consistent plan of action, that, at almost every stage, rests on the expectation
of certain contributions from his fellows. " That there is some kind of order, consistency
and constancy in social life is obvious. If there were not, none of us would be able to go
about his affiars or satisfy his most elementary wants." This orderliness cannot be the
result of a unified direction if we want individuals to adjust their actions to the particular
circumstances largely known only to them and never known in their totality to any one mind...

Such an order involving an adjustment to circumstances, knowledge of which is dispersed
among a great many people, cannot be established by central direction. It can arise only
from the mutual adjustments of the elements and their response to the events that act
immediately upon them. It is what M. Polyani has called the spontaneous formation of a
"polycentric order": "When order is achieved among human beings by allowing them to
interact with each other on their own initiative - subject only to the laws which uniformly
apply to all of them - we have a system of spontaneous order in society. We may say
that the efforts of these individuals are coordinated by exercising their individual intiative
and that this self coordination justifies this liberty on public grounds. -- The action of such
individuals are said to be free, for they are not determined by any *specific* command,
whether of a superior or public authority; the complusion to which they are subject is
impersonal and general.