Does private property co-ordinate without hierarchy?
It is usually to find right-libertarians maintain that private property (i.e. capitalism) allows economic activity to be co-ordinated by non-hierarchical means. In other words, they maintain that capitalism is a system of large scale co-ordination without hierarchy. These claims follow the argument of noted right-wing, “free market” economist Milton Friedman who contrasts “central planning involving the use of coercion – the technique of the army or the modern totalitarian state” with “voluntary co-operation between individuals – the technique of the marketplace” as two distinct ways of co-ordinating the economic activity of large groups (“millions”) of people. [Capitalism and Freedom, p. 13]. However, this is just playing with words. As they themselves point out the internal structure of a corporation or capitalist company is not a “market” (i.e. non-hierarchical) structure, it is a “non-market” (hierarchical) structure of a market participant (see section 2.2). However “market partic
