alt Hacker NewsMises 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.
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Many intellectuals have this problem. They make interesting, precise statements under specific assumptions, but they get interpreted in all kinds of directions.
When they push back against certain narratives and extrapolations they usually don’t succeed, because the same mechanism applies here as well.
The only thing they can do about it, is throwing around ashtrays.
So it will reach equilibrium unless literally anything disrupts that equilibrium. Got it.
An "autonomous market with enough agents" is carrying a lot of weight there, like "rational actors" and "as sample size goes to infinity'.
The problem with this is that "breaking the Nash equilibrium momentarily" is a spherical cow.
"Momentarily" can mean years or even decades, and millions of people can suffer or die as a result.
> optimal Nash equilibrium where both offer and demand are balanced
This roughly translates to "optimal utopian society which cannot be criticised in any way" right? Right??