The Dignity of the Individual

Chapter 4

Not long ago, on a Saturday morning in a small city in France, I walked up to an automatic teller machine set into the massive stone wall of a bank that was closed for the weekend. I stuck a piece of plastic into the machine, punched some buttons, waited a few seconds, and collected about $200, all without contact with any human being, much less anyone who knew me. I then took a taxi to the airport, where I approached a clerk at a rental-car counter, showed him a different piece of plastic, signed a form, and walked out with the keys to a $20,000 automobile, which I promised to return to someone else at a different location in a few days.

These transactions are so routine that the reader wonders why I bother to mention them. But stop for a moment and reflect on the wonders of the modern world: A man I had never seen before, who would never see me again, with whom I could barely communicate, trusted me with the keys to a car. A bank set up an automatic system that would give me cash on request thousands of miles from my home. A generation ago such things weren't possible; a couple of generations ago they would have been unimaginable; today they are the commonplace infrastructure of our economy. How did such a worldwide network of trust come about? We'll discuss the strictly economic aspects of this system in a later chapter. In this and the next few chapters, I want to explore how we get from the lone individual to the complex network of associations and connections that make up the modern world.

. . .

To return to the image with which we began chapter 4--being able to get cash and rent cars around the world--the human need for cooperation has helped to create vast and complex networks of trust, credit, and exchange. For such networks to function, we need several things: a willingness on the part of most people to cooperate with others and to keep their promises, the freedom to refuse to do business with those who refuse to live up to their commitments, a legal system that enforces the fulfillment of contracts, and a market economy that allows us to produce and exchange goods and services on the basis of secure property rights and individual consent. Such a framework lets people develop a diverse and complicated civil society that serves an incredible variety of needs.