While systemic causation in a free market is in one sense impersonal, in the sense that its outcomes are not specifically predetermined by any given person, "the market" is ultimately a way by which many people's individual personal desires are reconciled with those of other people. Too often a false contrast is made between the impersonal marketplace and the supposedly compassionate policies of various government programs. But both systems face the same scarcity of resources and both systems make choices within the constraints of that scarcity. The difference is that one system involves each individual making choices for himself or herself, while the other system involves a small number of people making choices for millions of others.

The mechanisms of the market are impersonal but the choices made by individuals are as personal as choices made anywhere else. It may be fashionable for journalists to refer to "the whim of the marketplace," as if that were something different from the desires of people, just as it was once fashionable to advocate "production for use, rather than profit"-- as if profits could be made by producing things that people cannot use or do not want to use. The real contrast is between choices made by individuals for themselves and choices made for them by others who presume to define what these individuals "really" need.

Thomas Sowell