Willow Glen

So there I was, at Willow Glen Coffee Roasting, pontificating on the nature of economics. "A market is an adaptive phenomena. It exists by serving the needs and wants that the government either can't or won't provide."

Mike and Susan had finished a delightful set and were exchanging the guitars for laptops. The early noon light filtered briskly through the windows and mingled with the aroma of countless coffee beans. Ken posited the question, his chair creaking as he turned to me, "So why are utopians so dead set against it? It would seem to cover the bases for the weaknesses in their systems."

"Precisely because of that." I retort back. "Because it persists, and in doing so, undercuts both their desire to rationalize the world under one viewpoint-their own-and their notion that that viewpoint is complete and total in and of itself. They cannot accept that their supposed power of reasoning has limitations."

"My belief in the power of markets has an odd existential base. Remember North Korea? The Kim family's failed utopia? In the Nineties, from winter '93 to winter '96 specifically, a perfect confluence of bad weather and bad policy gutted that society. A tenth of the population died, another tenth probably left and what was left was destitute.

Starting in winter '06, the circumstances looked set to repeat and the world braced itself for the final collapse-it didn't happen. Why?

Were the North Koreans tougher and more self-reliant than they were before? Was the government response more effective, this time?

In time, observers went into the North and what did they find-market stalls. Huge, open-air markets had opened even in Pyongyang itself. Crude and limited in selection as they were, they provided the distribution source that had saved their country from a second cataclysm. What better illustration of the power of the markets could there be?"