Some thoughts on the below Lyn Alden passage on price as information compression. Growing up in Massachusetts, I was taught to be suspicious of anything that sounded like “free markets.” The phrase carried a whiff of greed and exploitation. But what Alden points to here is simple: ten million people making everyday choices process far more real-time truth than a handful of planners ever could. From a Buddhist perspective, this is akin to dependent origination. Reality itself is a web of conditions — no central controller could ever grasp it all. The ego that tries to run the show limited, rigid, and eventually corrupt. When you let go, the interdependence of things takes care of itself. It’s scary to trust that — just as it was scary for me to leave an aikido teacher who had turned a bit cultish, or to question the state’s role in money. But the lesson keeps repeating: liberation isn’t in handing power to a central authority, it’s in seeing that no authority is needed. The ten million small decisions — or the ten thousand things (Lao Tzu) — are wiser than any ruler or guru could ever be. The passage from Broken Money p. 230: "Suppose that ten million people in a country make economic decisions, and they each buy five things per day. That’s 50 million transactions per day, or 18.25 billion transactions per year, nationwide. Can a central committee of elders allocate prices better than those ten million decentralized people can? Most evidence suggests no; ten million people can incorporate real-time information, and allocate prices better than a detached central committee of a handful of individuals. That is why politburos are not the most efficient form of economic planning; regardless of how wise and intelligent those individuals may be, they are incapable of processing and organizing the amount of information that ten million everyday people can with their various specific expertise."