On October 15, 2026, at SpaceX's base in Texas, Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster 2 did something that would have seemed like science fiction to previous generations. The unmanned prototype hovered wheels up a steep, curved ramp, took off, and rolled through the air. With the help of pulses from ten high-pressure air nozzles—cold-gas jet engines borrowed from SpaceX's rocket technology—it jumped over a row of parked Teslas, landed, and accelerated to 60 miles per hour, or roughly 60 mph, in less than a second.
Musk defined it precisely: a car that "can practically fly like a rocket." Production is scheduled to begin in 2028. The demonstration was not the product of a government mobility plan or a centrally issued research directive. It was the result of private capital, the engineering talent of two commercial companies, and a willingness to risk reputation and resources on an endeavor that might not succeed.
This single evening illustrates a more general truth: capitalists move the world because the market process mobilizes scattered knowledge, rewards useful ingenuity, and punishes failure in ways that no central plan can match. Friedrich Hayek explains why. In his classic essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” he notes that the knowledge needed to coordinate economic activity “never exists in a concentrated or unified form, but only as scattered pieces of incomplete and often contradictory knowledge held by individuals.” No planner, however brilliant or well-intentioned, can possess and process all the particular circumstances at any given time and in any given place, known only to the people there. Prices, profits, and losses accomplish this coordination.
For decades, Thomas Sowell has been showing what follows from this insight. Capitalism, he notes, is not an "ism" in the ideological sense of the word. It is rather the opposite: "simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever business deals they can agree upon among themselves." What political parlance calls "economic planning" is in practice "the forced substitution of the plans of other people for the decisions of government officials." These officials, however highly qualified, have only a small fraction of the necessary knowledge. Sowell has repeatedly emphasized that even the most knowledgeable person does not possess even one percent of all the knowledge available to society. Therefore, top-down schemes replace ignorance with the scattered local knowledge that markets constantly exploit. Under capitalism, failure is costly and instructive. In systems that invalidate private plans, it can be concealed, subsidized, or explained away by the actions of external enemies.
The Roadster demonstration vividly illustrates this contrast. Tesla and SpaceX are private enterprises. Engineers who know high-pressure gas systems from their work in rocketry can apply that knowledge to a sports car because both companies operate under the discipline of private ownership, in which owners receive residual income and bear losses. No government agency is tasked with inventing a “flying car.” Investors who expect a return, engineers who want to solve difficult problems, and customers who may one day pay for the results create the conditions under which the experiment becomes possible. Musk himself admits that success is not guaranteed, and that the car’s design did not take into account the usual safety standards. Such candor is possible only when the adverse consequences are borne by those who themselves chose to take the risk, not by taxpayers or bureaucrats who can claim their good intentions while passing the cost on to someone else.
Joseph Schumpeter described the broader process as “creative destruction”—the defining characteristic of capitalism. New combinations of knowledge and capital continually overturn established structures.
The gasoline car replaced the horse; today the electric car is shaking up the gasoline car; in turn, jet engines, borrowed from rocket technology, may overturn our ideas about the capabilities of a road vehicle. Schumpeter notes that the main impetus that keeps the capitalist engine moving comes from new goods, new methods, new markets, and new forms of organization. Central plans tend to protect existing structures because the people who implement them have a direct and strong interest in preserving stability and can use political power to resist change. Markets do not have such a tendency to protect the established. A company that cannot offer comparable opportunities to the innovations loses customers and capital. The process is chaotic and sometimes leads to waste in the short term; over time, however, it is through it that societies emerge from the technological and organizational stagnation characteristic of every pre-capitalist system.
Milton Friedman defends the same thesis through the prism of incentives and historical experience. The great achievements of civilization, he notes, are not the work of government offices. Einstein did not create his theories by bureaucratic order; Henry Ford did not revolutionize individual transportation in this way.
The only societies in which large numbers of ordinary people have escaped crushing poverty are those that have relied on capitalism. Where the state has attempted to centrally direct industrial development, the results have been chronic shortages of the goods that people actually want, surpluses of those that planners prefer, and slower technical progress outside the narrow circle of areas they have defined as priorities. Sowell has documented this pattern many times: when prices are set by political criteria rather than supply and demand, the feedback loop that tells producers what is scarce and what is abundant is lost. Warehouses fill with unsold goods, while lines form for others. Private firms operating at market-determined prices cannot ignore this signal for long. None of this is to say that every capitalist project succeeds or that all regulation is unnecessary. The Roadster’s jet engine suite raises valid questions about noise, safety certification, and airspace rules. These questions will be answered through consistent testing, accountability rules, and customer willingness-to-pay checks, not through a single planning authority deciding in advance what forms of transportation are acceptable. The same market process that produced the prototype will also curb over-promises. If the production model does not offer practical features at a price that customers can afford, capital will go elsewhere.
The real argument is therefore modest in its claims and based on experience. Over the past two centuries, the societies that have most consistently allowed the individual to combine capital, knowledge, and risk in the pursuit of private profit have achieved the greatest improvements in the material conditions of everyday life. Flying cars are simply the latest example. They did not come about because some Department of Transportation included “individual air mobility” in a five-year plan. They emerged because people, free to pursue their own agendas and yet faced with the need to convince others to cooperate and pay for them, found a way to turn rocketry knowledge into a new opportunity for the automobile.
As long as policymakers continue to view decentralized market coordination as a problem to be solved rather than a solution to a problem, socialist thinking will persist, even if it doesn't yield results. Capitalists, who are constantly finding new ways to move people, goods, and information around the world, will continue to do so not because they are distinguished by some exceptional virtue, but because the institutional environment in which they operate is constantly mobilizing scattered knowledge and constantly eliminating what doesn't work. That's why they move the world.
Source: trud.bg