Chuck Warman early on asked the obvious question: wasn't there intelligence
being input all the time?
Of course there was.
In Bill's example about product development, there was an intelligent goal
selected: a product that would appeal to the customer. They intelligently
chose a way to get there; sometimes it didn't work as planned (it WORKED, but
often not as well as desired), but each step supplied them more information to
work with. More intelligent decisions were made.
I would argue this system was INTELLIGENTLY designed, just not EFFICIENTLY
designed.
Glenn seems to think not only that the economic system is irreducibly complex
(it isn't--you can remove money and replace it with debits; you can remove
regulation and we'd even have a BETTER system, etc. etc.) but that it was not
in any sense designed. That would come as quite a shock to all the people
involved in the establishment of fractional reserve banking, limited liability
corporations, incentivized manufacturing, stock ownership, free trade
agreements, civil contract protection, and the U.S. Patent Office, to name a
few. Perhaps all these people were completely unaware of what they were doing
(like monkeys on typewriters), but somehow I think they had their goals in
mind as they contributed their intelligence to the design of the system.
What do you say, Glenn? Was Alexander Hamilton a monkey?
Jim