I wish to examine for a moment further Hayek's claim "Though it is widely believed that the conception of an optimal economic policy... presupposes... maximizing aggregate real social income.. this is in fact not so. An optimal policy in a catallaxy may aim, and ought to aim, at increasing the chances of any member of society taken at random of having a high income, or, what amounts to the same thing, the chance that, whatever his share in total income may be, the real equivalent of this share will be as large as we know how to make it."

I agree that maximizing aggregate real social income is not a proper or complete economic policy, but that is not for Hayek's reasons that catallaxies need to be left alone. It is because the best total social income may occur in a society where distribution of benefits and burdens is so grossly unfair that we would condemn it on moral grounds. Taking an extreme case first:imagine that a state where 40% of the labor force was enslaved to work 15 hours a day gave the highest aggregate income, but that the slaves received only enough of that income to sustain themselves. Suppose the other 60% of people simply worked enough to make certain the slaves did their work properly. We would say such a system is less justified than one where, say, everyone works 8 hours a day with reasonable compensation for what they do, but that the total income is somewhat less than that of the slave state. Even using Hayek's principle, and giving everyone a fair chance (say by a lottery) to be masters or managers with the highest possible income, still would not be sufficient to make such a slave state appealing. Simply having a chance, or chances to earn a high income is not what is crucial. First, the chance has to be real in some sense, and perhaps to a certain extent, continuous in a way I will address shortly. Second opportunity for income should be generally based on contribution to the economy, not just exploitation of it. Third, the chance for a higher income should not come at the expense of others if that is unnecessary for there to be a chance at a reasonable income for a larger number of deserving people. And finally, since a "chance" at high income is not as good as an actual high income, it seems to me it would be wrong for a society to maximize merely chances at high income if it could reasonably actually maximize everyone's income. To have a system which "maximizes the opportunity for any given person to get the most" is ambiguous. It can apply to a case where all people have the chance to make a great deal of money at the same time, or it can mean that each person has the opportunity to make a great deal of money, but not all of them can actually make that money at the same time. For example, a $50,000,000 lottery will give everyone an opportunity to win $50,000,000 but only in the second sense, not the first.

For the case not to be so extreme, simply imagine any society divided into those who work hard and those who work much less, with those who work the hardest, often receiving the least share of the aggregate. If the difficult labor is involuntarily and undesirable, if there is no really good chance to improve one's lot by one's socially or economically benevolent efforts, if one only improves one's lot at the unnecessary expense of someone else, and/or if those who benefit most make no reasonable and commensurate contribution, it is difficult to imagine that to be a desirable society even though it might meet Hayek's principle of giving everyone the greatest chance at having a high income or of having the largest share of income we know how to make. Of course, a catallaxy or any economy could operate that way; but it is doubtful that it should, and that there would not be a better catallaxy or economy.

I do not believe there is going to be any simplistic operating principle for the best economic system or catallaxy in an interdependent society, none simpler than the principle I proposed near the beginning of this work as being the point of an economic system -- maximizing the benefits and minimizing the burdens of the greatest number of deserving people in the fairest and most reasonable way. Judgment is always going to be required to decide fairness and desert. And judgment is going to be necessary to decide the proper balance in particular circumstances between increasing burdens over benefits on the one hand and being fair on the other. Otherwise we run the risk of saying that seemingly reasonable (individual) rules are more important than reasonable results. I would think what we want is the system or systems that have the most reasonable rules and the most reasonable results, and that allow whatever reasonable modifications wise judgment requires whenever it becomes obvious that the economy is not functioning in the most desirable possible way. Most people have somewhat intuitive ideas of what constitutes a fair, efficient, productive, beneficent economy. The challenges are to articulate these in a consistent and comprehensive or complete way, and then to come up with operating principles which most closely reflect those ideas and help us achieve that kind of economy. That is a complex enterprise, that I suspect will not have a simplistic or obvious algorithm. It may even lead to a number of different, mutually exclusive, hopefully non-antagonistic, systems which different people find more comfortable for themselves.

But returning to Hayek, if we look at his principle of trying to maximize the chance of any individual's having as large a share of income as possible instead of trying to maximize the social aggregate, it appears that we run the risk of having less for everyone (else) than might otherwise happen. The obvious non-economic example is any team sport, where cooperation generally leads to higher aggregate scoring than does individual attempts at heroics. Sometimes the best player on the team will even score more himself through team play than he would if he were trying to hog the ball. Of course, if you play with a system that gets each person the most points he could possibly score, the team aggregate will also be the highest it could be. But the reverse is not necessarily true; the highest aggregate score may not give each player the most points he could have scored had he played a different way.

Economically the same is true. A person intent on making the best individual deals he can for himself, may not end up the best he could, and may not end up in the best overall society he could. And anyone in a system which gives the best overall society may not end up as wealthy as he might have been in a society with less overall wealth. But everyone who lives in a society where everyone makes the most they could make in any society, will automatically live in the society with the best aggregate as well. Unfortunately, this latter case is not the most likely one to occur or to be able to be generated. When it is not, choices have to be made about which outcomes are the best ones to allow or to try to achieve, and about which principles to follow regarding individual transactions in order to try to achieve those outcomes. And choices have to be made about how to determine in a fair way who should benefit most when two people cannot benefit equally. Those choices get made individually, and to some extent by society collectively. I think there are better ways for individuals and societies to deal with this than to have principles which simply try to maximize aggregate social good or which simply try to maximize individual wealth. 

Philosopher John Rawls has proposed a policy that among other things, does not allow certain kinds of distributions unless the least advantaged also benefit. I think that is too strong; if one is inclined to think along these lines, otherwise justifiable transactions should be allowed that do not significantly harm the least advantaged, even if they do not help them. If what you would do helps you, but does not significantly harm anyone else and there is no other reasonable objection to it (such as, you are undeserving of any additional benefit to begin with because you are lazy or dishonest) there is no reason you should be held back just because others would not benefit as well as you. I say "significantly harm" the least advantaged because, I can conceive of situations where doing slight harm to people that are already disadvantaged might do enough good to those, say, just a little better off than them that even the disadvantaged would agree it is better for them to make the small sacrifice. Further, Rawls' distribution principle by itself does not determine how benefits should be distributed when they cannot be distributed equally. And it makes no mention of how someone became disadvantaged to begin with, which is probably significant as to how deserving they are; for if one is disadvantaged through his own choices and fault, one is perhaps "owed" much less than is one who is disadvantaged by circumstances beyond his control, particularly if he has done much good for the community or tried to, or would in the future if just given additional opportunity. Moreover, the problem also has to be solved in any given situation whereby assisting the disadvantaged fosters further disadvantages that then need further assistance.  For example, if feeding a hungry population were to foster a Malthusian further increase in that population, the problem of starvation will only have been postponed or transferred, not solved. Solutions, not postponements or increases, must be found for the problems of the disadvantaged.  

Moreover, assuming we could have a solution instead of a temporary measure of help, it seems to me that a better principle than Rawls', but along his own lines, is that as long as resources are available and reasonable to use in this way, the necessities of the disadvantaged should come before the conveniences and luxuries of others. However, conveniences and luxuries of the least advantaged do not necessarily need to catch up to the conveniences and luxuries of others before those others can move even further ahead in conveniences and luxuries.  Again I think we have better and more complex intuitions than Rawls' principle captures.