Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises.

Liberals force lower middle-class families, who love their children, to dispatch them to ghetto schools dominated by gangs of fatherless boys bearing knives.

Giving is the vital impulse and moral center of capitalism.

Entropy is Janus-faced. Its upside surprises are redemptive and favorable to freedom. It is freedom of choice. But the carrier itself requires constant vigilance against entropic noise. Order is not spontaneous, but it is a necessary condition for all the surprises of freedom and opportunity.

Some economists became obsessed with market efficiency and others with market failure. Generally held to be members of opposite schools-freshwater and saltwater, Chicago and Cambridge, liberal and conservative, Austrian and Keynesian-both sides share an essential economic vision. They see their discipline as successful insofar as it eliminates surprise-insofar, that is, as the inexorable workings of the machine override the initiatives of the human actors.

Like the Pentagon, our social science often reduces all phenomena to dollars and body counts. Sexuality, family unity, kinship, masculine solidarity, maternity, motivation, nurturing, all the rituals of personal identity and development, all the bonds of community, seem "sexist," "superstitious," "mystical," "inefficient," "discriminatory." And, of course, they are -- and they are also indispensable to a civilized society.

Socialism is an insurance policy bought by all the members of a national economy to shield them from risk. But the result is to shield them from knowledge of the real dangers and opportunities.