As economy emerged from the economic interactions of people, it
had the effect of encouraging more rational, economic thinking
among people. Thus, it is not that man is Homo economus, as
economists think, but that free markets make us more likely to
act in more economic-rational ways. Since we remain social
mammals, we will never be rid of our social rules of behavior
which constrain our rationalist behavior. The irony is that as
markets made man more rational, we began to think that using
reason would be the best way to transform the world, that it
could be rationally ordered and organized. The result was the
rise of ideas of economic planning based on a rationalist model,
giving rise to various forms of socialism. The irony being that,
without free markets, the pressure on people to think rationally
is released, so that socialism leads us directly back to
nonrationalist thinking, and the very foundations originally
claimed for having a planned economy are undermined. Faced with
this, those who fundamentally