[TheOtherHobbes]

The laissez-faire line is that the common good happens spontaneously if you allow some people to buy ten cars. Because that's "freedom".

No matter that homelessness is rising, life expectancy is falling, debt is increasing to catastrophic levels, the planet's ecology is becoming increasingly hostile to life (ask the Australians...) - and counter-evidence is piling up on all sides.

The suggestion that aggressively acquisitive small-minded personal selfishness ought to be the one true motivator of a healthy economy should be obvious laugh-out-loud nonsense to anyone capable of rational thought.

And yet, mysteriously, it's not just taken seriously, it's elevated to a near-mystical principle of omniscient collective market wisdom. (With the caveat here that markets need to be "educated" - an interesting thing to define.)

It's really quite strange.