Thank you for your comment, Fred, but you missed my point. Let me try
to explain better. You have been quick to blame the housing bubble to
government intervention. But I am not discussing THIS housing bubble,
or any other specific one.  Bubbles can arise for any reason
whatsoever, which can be explainable in simple terms (e.g. government
intervention) or by some random or irrational reason (rumors,
mistakes, etc.). Whatever the reason, as prices become inflated beyond
a certain threshold it is reasonable for individuals to bet on further
rises, which actually cause such rises on which people will continue
betting. This is fully rational, as far as each individual is concerned.

The bursting of the bubble may be rational as well, as you point out,
from the individual point of view. But it is insane from a collective
point of view: we all pay the price in terms of bankruptcies,
failures, bailouts, unemployment, waste of resources, etc. And it is
all the more insane as we have witnessed such things happening, always
following a similar scheme (but with different occasioning causes),
for at least a couple of centuries, and we still haven't learned how
to prevent them.

I could have chosen a different example. Each entrepreneur has an
interest in reducing his/her own worker's salary. If all entrepreneurs
succeed in such a policy, the worker's purchasing power is reduced,
and may (depending on what the entrepreneurs do with their increased
share of income) result in the impossibility of selling the produce at
the desired price, or may even give rise to a general glut.

My point is: if 'spontaneous' means the emergence of unintended
consequences, then the term indicates nothing else as a divergence
between the properties of individuals and systems -- which has been
noted in the history of science at least since the first criticisms of
reductionism. There are situations like that every time the elements
of the system are not independent of each other (i.e., all the
situations in which methodological individualism fails): in such a
case, the collective curve is not the sum of the individual ones.

Whether the outcome of this is 'order' or not, it depends on how one
defines 'order'. If, whatever the outcome (e.g., the economic
situation in which we are now), one is prepared to call it 'order',
that's fine: but let it be clear that by one means nothing else than:
'order' is the result of some underlying logic (whether we understand
it or not). Even chaos (in the sense of chaos theory) is
deterministic, after all. But we should be careful not to attach any
judgement on the desirability of such an 'order': not all the outcomes
are welcome.

Daniele Besomi