Murray Rothbard on order vs. chaos

Another critical dispute between traditionalists and libertarians is over the role and the nature of order.  To the traditionalist, order is the overriding consideration, and order can only be achieved by a massive imposition of state coercion.  To the traditionalist, liberty is arrant chaos and disorder, and the libertarian is someone who wishes to sacrifice order on the altar of liberty.  The libertarian, on the contrary, has a diametrically opposed view.  To him, the only genuine order among men proceeds out of free and voluntary interaction: a lasting order that emerges out of liberty rather than by suppressing it.  With Proudhon [considered by many to be the "father of anarchism"], the libertarian hails Liberty as the "Mother, not the Daughter of Order."  In this way, the libertarian sees the harmonious interaction of free people as akin to the harmonious interaction of natural entities that is summed up as "natural law."

State coercion, on the other hand, is viewed by the libertarian as a pseudo-order which actually results in disorder and chaos.  State-imposed order is "artificial" and destructive of the harmony provided by following the natural order.  Economic science has long shown that individuals, pursuing their own interests in the marketplace, will benefit everyone.  The free market has been shown to be the only genuine economic order, while state coercion hampering that market only subverts genuine order and causes dislocation, general impoverishment and, eventually, economic chaos.  Moreover, one of our most distinguished free-market economists, F.A. Hayek, has extended the concept of what he has trenchantly termed "spontaneous order" to include many other activities than the economic sphere.  Hayek has pointed out that the evolution of human language itself was not imposed by coercion from above but emerged from the free and voluntary interaction of individual persons.  To use a phrase of Hayek's language, the origin of money, and the market itself were products or byproducts of human action, not human design.

~ Murray Rothbard, "Frank S. Meyer: The Fusionist as Libertarian," originally published in Modern Age, Fall 1981, pp. 16-17

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon