Michael Perelman wrote:
>Fred Folvary wrote
> > "In a pure market economy, all activity is
> > voluntary for everyone."
>
>
>Would a workplace where people have to submit to the authority of a boss
>constitute voluntary behavior?  I understand that the wage transaction
>might be voluntary (within limits) -- I mean what happens on the job.


This is why it's important to make the sorts of distinction Hayek 
does between "orders" (e.g., markets as a whole) and "organizations" 
(e.g., the particular entities that comprise markets such as firms 
and households).  Although spontaneous orders have no "boss" and the 
relationships among the entities that comprise them might best be 
understood as voluntary, the entities themselves are normally not 
spontaneous orders.  Households/families and firms have 
bosses.  Within those organizations people do get bossed 
around.  From a Hayekian perspective that doesn't make the market as 
a whole any less of a spontaneous order as the patterns that emerge 
from the interactions of those households and firms are of no one's 
intention.  But it does cast a skeptical eye on Fred's claim if "all 
activity" is understood to include the things that happen "inside" 
the entities that comprise the spontaneous order.

I have to add that I've found this whole discussion somewhat 
frustrating.  Fred's original post was particularly misleading in his 
equation of "spontaneous" with "of one's own free will."  This is 
emphatically not the idea of "spontaneous" that is being used by 
Hayek and others in this tradition.  The "spontaneity," as I noted in 
an earlier note, referred to the unplanned nature of the order that 
emerged not the actions that comprise the eventual emergence of that 
order.  That confusion has been rightly exploited by Michael to raise 
this point in response to Fred.  And this only goes to show that 
"spontaneous" was a really unfortunate and confusing adjective, but 
it is the hand we are dealt as historians of thought.

An understanding of the term "spontaneous order" that actually roots 
itself in the texts such as Hayek's would be able to make the 
distinctions necessary to avoid Michael's very correct observation 
somehow being turned  into an objection to the idea of spontaneous 
order.  Fred's mistaken equation of "spontaneous" with "of free will" 
(at least in the historical context of the term "spontaneous order") 
is the road to confusion on this topic.

Steve Horwitz