The view that now pervades much public policy economics implicitly presents the relevant choice as between an ideal norm and an existing "imperfect" institutional arrangement. This nirvana approach differs considerably from a comparative institution approach in which the relevant choice is between alternative real institutional arrangements.
A relevant notion of efficiency must refer to scarcity and people as they are, not as they could be.
Modern analysis has yet to describe inefficiency in a world where indivisibilities are present and knowledge is costly to produce.
The legal substructure is private; the use of payments to influence the behavior of others is neither prohibited nor frowned upon. But the ' frictions" that perfect decentralization assumes away, must be lived with in laissez-faire.
Business firms, in which controlled cooperation takes place, are the first important implication of costly transactions. The laissez-faire filtering process, using the profit test, selects some of these business organizations for survival and rejects others.