Advertising is a poorly understood commercial activity, and most would assume it to be obviously to the disadvantage of the consumer, who may come to buy a more expensive or an inferior product simply because it has been advertised. We know, after all, that advertising can defend as well as extend markets, and it is tempting to see such defense as the employment of suasion to compromise the interests of the consumer.
However, it is conceivable that advertising in fact supplies a very considerable benefit to the consumer, who comes to know of a utility or a good without having to make any considerable effort. The valure of this service should not be underestimated, least of all by anyone, surely most of us, who have had to spend hours on the internet searching for a product that will address a particular need.
Advertisers are or can be seen as saving consumer time, and this may be considered to compensate them for any shortfall in quality or premium in price (to pay for the advertising for example), though I would suspect that these deficiencies are more often imagined than real. Producers able to sustain a significant and costly advertising campaign are very probably competitive.

Natural selection has left its signature on mind and behaviour in the statistical tendencies across populations and individuals over time: Humans accumulate resources to secure reproduction (doing much else besides and having many adventures along the way), and in order to do this they tend to ensure their survival, whilst also tending to support relatives as they work towards similar outcomes. All other activities tend to support these activities.

In situations were one is manifestly surrounded by more or less near kin it is genetically adaptive to be collectivist; in situations where one is encompassed with others only very distantly related it is adaptive to be an individualist. Thus it is probable that "individualism" as a widespread behavioural characteristic emerges as a result of of an influx of population from several sources, diluting kin-density, or a major shift or mixing and relocation of the population. Indeed, it may be taken as an axiom that mobile populations will tend to become individualist over time.

Fear of salient relative wealth, incurring disapprobation and intimidation, is and has always been widespread, and most acute over narrow social intervals and short geographical distances. In the present democratic phase this has produced reverse sumptuary self-regulation, where it is socially unacceptable to dress in ways that are perceived as claiming relative advantage. Cars are a partial exception to this rule, partly because so few are actually owned by the drivers, and partly because the owner is shielded from attack by the velocity or potential velocity of the vehicle. The rich dress down, but drive up (and park in a secure location).

We should not sniff at the recourse to authority agreed to be common amongst the early medievals. They were writing at a time of relative societal, indeed intellectual simplicity; the writings of the past, particularly the classical past, were evidently from a time when men had such resources at hand as could only be dreamed of in 1100 or for some centuries after. Books to read, the conversation of an experienced intelligentsia of a size quite remarkable to one writing in the depopulated middle ages. And most important, the present had so little in the way of equipment and instrumentation to allow them to make empirical observations. In such a situation is it surprising that they preferred to take the word of those who had all of these things?

The standard view is that without public support via state subsidised universities and other organs of research there would be much less of this work. In other words, it is held to be a classic public good. However, an alternative view can be taken; namely, that the public is frightened of private knowledge, just as the public, by which I mean each individual member of that public, fears the power and success of every other member. In such a situation the attractiveness of university supported research is that it prevents knowledge falling into private hands. In other words, those who invoke the 'crowding-out' effect as a persuasive argument against public funding of science are being psychologically naive. The crowding-out of private knowledge construction is regarded as a benefit rather than a disadvantage; indeed, it is the whole point of public support for scientific research.

Science is a network of propositions that are more or less interconnected and consistent in spite of having no single author. It is a collective process, and though many individuals are involved at any one time and over long periods, and they are not always in communication, there is a goal in common, namely the description of the world. The approximate mutual consistency of the network gives it the appearance of a designed output assembled by many and easy to mistake as intended by many to serve a shared desire for knowledge.

This misleads scientists into thinking that there is or must be a collective economic output, which misunderstanding explains the almost universal collectivism of that profession.

However, the networks of science were unplanned, and result not from the intention of a , single collective will but from trial and error, with mutual consistency resulting from many discrete decisions regarding each individual proposition, permitting this one to stand, or condemning that one to fail. Similarly, the network of manufacture and exchange that we see all around us is co-ordinated as the result of a multitude of individual decisions, not because of some collective or socialised will to production to serve some collective requirement.

Fear is the the psychological root of collectivism; fear of insignificance; fear of the disapprobation of others; fear of the success of others; fear that the disasters of the natural world will affect other families less than our own; fear of failure; fear of wasted effort; fear of the world's vicissitudes. Against all these things men and women are inclined to seek insurance, and this terror is a powerful motivation in many of our actions and inactions, indeed it is the only force that can be identified beneath popular support for socialising legislation. Conversely, those unwilling to to support socialising policies are simply stating their own relative lack of fear – or to put in quotes: "I'm all right, Jack". The competent have less to fear and more to gain from even the greatest hazards of the highest of risk. Consequently, hostility to socialising policy arises not only from the fear of sequestration of assets, but from the correct judgment that such policies vastly reduce the potential gains, and not only for the individuals concerned.

Politically, the collectivism arising from fear manifests itself as socialism, which as an institutional movement is driven by the interests of the state's executive personnel, who are generally speaking capable, and can be said to exploit the timidity of the weak as well as, to some degree, addressing their fears. The resulting policies are dangerous since they weaken the aggregate society, by foregoing wealth that would make society stronger in the face of external shock. On this view, socialising policies are, and this will inevitably seem paradoxical, both short-sighted and selfish.

This problem is deeply intractable because the weaker are not wrong; they would indeed be disadvantaged by a distribution of wealth and power that optimised the generation of aggregate societal wealth, and it is impossible to see how to deal with this without force or subterfuge; the weak would either have to be deceived or discarded, neither option being attractive, and the optimal method would be the latter since deceit is likely to be so very expensive, as we know from the costs of the Church when it provided this and certain other services.

If this is correct, then societies that devote what is necessarily a very large proportion of their energies to reducing to nothing the disadvantages of incompetence and misfortune, will themselves ultimately fail. Only unequal societies, which are, correctly, perceived as unfair can prosper.
Is this shocking? Yes? Then history and its product is shocking too.

Market failures are over-diagnosed. Since there is no principled way of limiting the consequences of an action, negative and positive externalities, to use the economist's term, stretch out on every side, in effect cancelling each other. Indeed, in everyday moral life we recognise this. I choose to sit at a table, or not to suit my sense of convenience. But this choice may, perhaps, on the one hand cause a war two-hundred years hence, or, on the other, the discovery of a wonder cure that saves the lives of countless millions. On balance these speculative costs and benefits are neither held against me nor counted to my credit. The fact that such externalities are indeterminable because the causal chains are so long is of course important, and does mark them out as different from those with clearer ancestry, the pollution of a water course by a manufacturing plant for example. But the distinction fades in significance when we recall that beyond the readily identifiable varieties of consequences stretch the infinity of effects already noted, dwarfing even those cases where effects are in fact determinable. In the extreme case, choosing to sit at a table or not, we balance them out, reasoning that the indeterminable negative externalities are, in all probability, balanced by an equal quantity of indeterminable positives. Perhaps we should do the same even with situations where the externality seems more manifestly identifiable.

Indeed, there must be a strong suspicion that the discussion of externalities has become polluted by normative ethics. It is the indeterminable externalities that cause the confusion and resentment. The impacts of climate change strike some as manifestly determinable; others as equally clearly quite otherwise. And there is a reasonable suspicion that the positive internalities may have been understated, let alone the positive externalities.

Furthermore, we might ask whether externalities are even an economic consideration. Aren't they a legal matter. Or to put it another way, the concept of market failure is quite artificial and results from extruding the economic domain beyond its field of competence, and into the legal zone (i.e. the field of normative behavioural morals), where it has no power and can hardly be expected to succeed. Does this result from the ambition of economists in their professional capacity? We can see from Freakonomics and the Undercover Economist that the will to expansion is certainly there.

If my point is sound, and I am at this writing prepared to defend it with vigour, then we should be very suspicious of attempts to resolve 'market failures' through economic policy. Since that failure is an artefact of over-extending the field of economic competence it is very unlikely that an economic solution will be viable. It is law that is required, not factitious pricing in of externalities.

Support for this view can be found in the fact that in some cases it is the victim of the pollution who is forced to pay the polluter to stop. This is may seem morally and even economically bizarre. However, in relation to simple criminal and many civil cases this point does not arise, and we accept without question that the victim, or prospective victim, pays taxes to support the rule of law that stops or deters the offender. Pollution is no different, and is obviously, on this reasoning, an area best handled by law, not economic measures.

Property rights have no foundation, any more than morals. All are nailed down in the air for reasons related to practical outcomes. In other words, rules that produce favourable outcomes for people, statistically over time, tend to stabilise, while those that do not produce such outcomes disappear. Indeed, property rights are little different in any respect from moral rules, however surprising that may seem at first blush; a tedious explanation might be possible, but to cut a long story short, property rights are just a set of domain specific moral rules, and traditional wisdom categorises them in this way (as witness the Decalogue).

Putting aside factitious doubts and being honest with ourselves, we know why property rights have stabilised: they are advantageous, statistically, for individuals in those societies. It is as simple as that, but of course there is no reason to suppose that they are optimal for all or any individuals at any one time, any more than there a straightforward physical adaptation will be optimal for any or all possessing that trait at any particular time.
The utility of a moral rule may on average be general, but at any observed instant it may happen to be exploited by a minority or an individual for sectarian or personal advantage.

Property rights have stabilised all over the world because, for the most part, they secure, however indirectly, individual reproduction. But, as ever, there is a tension between the interest of the individual in maximising their own property and restraining others in their exercise of this freedom, and the efficiency of the system at maximising aggregate wealth (and resilience to external shock) is a principal feature of individualist societies; but in fact individuals prefer collectivist societies with low levels of variation in wealth even if this produces (as it does) low levels of aggregate wealth and less resilient societies. Fortunately they cheat as much as they possibly can; private vices bring forth public benefits.