Does The Market Produce Truth Telling?

Does The Market Produce Truth Telling?

Every polity possesses a market order – it must.

Very few polities produce truth telling – truth telling is extremely expensive.

Its expensive because its an investment in a commons (norm). And that investment is easily open to privatization (cheating).

Ergo, groups demonstrate the minimum truth possible necessary to survive rather than the highest trust necessary to complete.

Cheating is demonstration of a shorter(higher) time preference, and truth telling and longer(lower) time preference. With meritocratic ability (skill talent knowledge) determining the value of common investment(truth telling/production) versus private consumption (cheating/parasitism).

Ergo the less genetic pacification (culling of the underclass), and the less pacification of parasitism (rule of law and property), the lower the trust and the greater the parasitism, and the greater the demand for the state.

This is compatible with the Nozickian origins of social order (they will emerge out of cooperative necessity). But not with locke,hobbes,rousseu,hume who seem not to have (I could be wrong) identified the equilibrium between pure self interest and cheating and the extraordinary returns on morality and cooperation. Meaning Axelrod is right that the prisonner’s dilemma is the state of nature we must answer.

So of all the prior era writers’ imaginings of the state of nature, appear to have been either wrong or insufficient.