Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla View Post
Any system will evolve given rules and time. The reason we can speak about evolution so robustly is because we can apply the scientific method to it. Economics is not the same and it cant be studied the same way.

So it's an evolving system, sure, but you can't think of it like evolution.
I don't mean that the system evolves, but that the system functions similarly to biological evolution. The dynamic of natural selection isn't much different characteristically than what we could call consumer selection or product selection or whatever. Simplifying evolution, we have two factors: environment and mutation. These factors interact and the most able to succeed do while the others die. This doesn't create perfect specimens. Instead it creates all sorts of whack specimens. But our attempts to engineer something better with similar complexity has come as close to success as a doberman is to inventing wormhole travel.

Markets are the same. Two factors: production and consumption. They interact for a spell then the companies and consumer behavior that is most able to succeed, does. If we're sticking to this analogy, government is sorta like eugenics. Wherever it regulates, it chooses the winners and losers, not based on their own merits, but based on arbitrary concerns of the government and effects (predicted or unpredicted) of the regulations.