John Stossel on 'Rinkonomics': Forget Leaders, You Should Be in Charge

Rinkonomics: the Skating Rink Analogy

Consider a skating rink. Imagine telling someone who'd never been to a skating rink that people strap blades to their feet and all of them -- old people, young people, good skaters, bad skaters -- speed around on slippery ice. They'd say, "No, you can't do that! It would be a catastrophe! You need to plan this! Someone needs to be in charge!"

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But as economist Daniel Klein notes in his essay "Rinkonomics," skating rinks work harmoniously without planning. It's something economists call spontaneous order. Skaters look out for themselves. They're each left to do their own thing and, surprisingly, they rarely crash.

Nature is full of spontaneous order: schools of fish moving together, a productive ant colony where every ant does its own thing, a flock of birds darting through the air moving as a single unit.

"We don't notice there are many things in our lives that work beautifully and smoothly as if they were organized but without an organizer," said George Mason University economist Russ Roberts, author of the new book "The Price of Everything."

The Planners vs. the Individuals

Humans require some predictable and understandable rules, like the rules children learn in kindergarten: Don't hit other people, don't take their stuff and don't break promises. But most of life is governed by spontaneous order. People choose their jobs, hobbies, lovers, recreation and most of the best things in life, not the government.

The order that comes spontaneously works much better than the order that comes when a central authority plans, because the planners can never account for or predict the great myriad individual needs and interests.

The old Soviet Union is an example of what happens when government tries to plan the economy: The planner doesn't plan for enough of the right things, which results in shortages. Many Soviets waited in lines for hours of every day.