In this week's Acton Commentary I take on Thanos' zero-sum economic worldview as manifest in Avengers: Infinity War. In the classic debate over positivity and normativity in economics, Thanos is definitely not a value-free figure. He pursues, with single-minded tenacity and brutality, the moral good he perceives.
[The free moral order] is able to sustain more from discoverable resources (and indeed in that process discover more resources) than would be possible by a personally directed process. And although this morality is not "justified" by the fact that it enables us to do these things, and thereby to survive, it does enable us to survive, and there is something perhaps to be said for that.
Or as Hayek also later observes, "neither socialism nor any other known substitute for the market order could sustain the current population of the world." And that carries some significant moral weight.
Read more: Ian Irwin and Andrew Yuengert, "The Laboratory as a Discovery Process? Vernon Smith, Hayek, and Experimental Economics," Journal of Markets & Morality 19, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 253-274.