If you lived in the old Soviet Union, you might have done seemingly irrational things like buying a burned-out light bulb from a peddler in Moscow's Gorky Park or standing in line for hours to buy unknown goods that you might not even need. But your behavior would have been perfectly rational in the in the twisted context of socialism's planned chaos. Think of it as "spontaneous disorder" — the opposite of what we enjoy in our free-market system.

When the Whole Is Greater Than Its Parts

The order that emerges from simple free market rules is amazingly complex, resilient, and efficient.

"Emergent order," also known as "spontaneous order" or "self-organization," results from the interactions between individual components or members of a network in which each member both receives and transmits information that causes other members to alter their behavior according to a set of rules. Myriad interactions between members create an order that was neither the intent nor the design of any single member.

Emergent orders exist in physical, biological, and social systems or networks. In his book National Economic Planning: What Is Left?, the late Austrian economist Don Lavoie used a termite nest to illustrate emergent order in biological systems.