alt Hacker NewsContrary to propaganda from the likes of Ludwig von Mises, the free market is not some kind of optimal solution to all of our problems. And it certainly does not produce excellent software.
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Mises never claimed that the free market produced the most optimal solutions at a given moment. In fact Mises explicitly stated many times that the free market does indeed incur in semi-frequent self-corrections, speculations and manipulations by the agents.
What Mises proposition was - in essence - is that an autonomous market with enough agents participating in it will reach an optimal Nash equilibrium where both offer and demand are balanced. Only an external disruption (interventionism, new technologies, production methods, influx or efflux of agents in the market) can break the Nash equilibrium momentarily and that leads to either the offer or the demand being favored.
Propaganda is quite a strong term to describe the works of an economist. If one wants to debate the ideas of von Mises, it'd be useful to consider the Zeitgeist at that time. Von Mises preferred free markets in contrast to the planned economy of the communists. Partly because the latter has difficulties in proper resource allocation and pricing. Note that this was decades before we had working digital computers and digital communication systems, which, at least in theory, change the feasibility of a planned economy.
Also, the last time I checked, the US government produced its goods and services using the free market. The government contractors (private enterprises) are usually tasked with building stuff, compared with the government itself in a non-free, purely planned economy (if you refer to von Mises).
I assume that you originally meant to refer to the idea that without government intervention (funding for deep R&D), the free market itself would probably not have produced things like the internet or the moon landing (or at least not within the observed time span). That is, however,a rather interesting idea.
I can't think of a time when I've found an absolutist position useful or intelligent, in any field. Free-market absolutism is as stupid as totalitarianism. The content of economics papers does not need to be evaluated to discard an extreme position, one need merely say "there are more things in earth and heaven than are dreamed of in your philosophies"