4). As an example, disequilibrium prices across a market for a specific good signals a market failure – the fact that gains from trade that could have been captured have been passed by, and that the market has not cleared (Kirzner 1992: 144-146). But more so than merely discovering market failures, the market system – and this is what is most important for our purposes – through its “heady scent of profits” also incentivizes the entrepreneur to remedy these failures by using existing technologies or introducing new technologies to capture these forgone opportunities (Kirzner 1973/2013: 178). This is the sense of discovery we are most interested in: the ability of the competitive market process to signal failures and the ability of the market system to incentivize the discovery of novel solutions to help remedy these failures through the reward of profits. Using Hayek’s insights concerning the relationship between ignorance and the competitive market process we now see clearly how the public reason liberal can respond to the modified JFC in the face of the failures of epistemic democratic approaches. The modified JFC says that though there may be rules satisfying the public justification principle, those rules we currently know of do not. The public reason liberal can respond by endorsing those institutions that best allow society to discover unknown forms of social organization capable of solving these justificatory failures; and, moreover, those institutions which incentivize persons to actually go out and find such forms of social organization. Following Hayek, the answer lies in setting up a system of governance that relies on competition to achieve these ends: if there is competition in governance, then we incentivize persons to find arrangements justified to all, thereby adequately addressing the modified JFC. Just like entrepreneurs remedying market failures through discovering new technologies, moral entrepreneurs remedy justificatory failures through discovering new rules satisfying the public reason liberal’s justificatory demands. 6. Polycentric Public Reason Now we all know how market competition works when it comes to normal consumer goods – things like bicycles, books, and batteries. It is less clear, though, how we can have market competition in the choice of rules and institutions, which is essentially what the current proposal requires if we are to have competition act as a discovery procedure in the manner
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