Objectivism, Fatalism, and the Free Market: You Decide the Market in 2026

There is a strange similarity between two positions that often appear to be opposites: fatalism and an excessively rigid interpretation of the free market.

The fatalist says:

My destiny has already been determined. What I do cannot really change it.

The extreme market fatalist says:

The market has decided which projects receive money. If a project cannot obtain enough money through ordinary market mechanisms, that is the market’s verdict. I should not interfere by donating.

The structures of these arguments are surprisingly similar.

Both transform the result of human choices into something external and almost metaphysical.

But your destiny depends partly on what you do, and markets depend partly on what people do with their money.

A market is not a god. It has no independent will.

You should make economic choices. You should not imagine that “the market” has already made them for you.

When Respect for the Free Market Becomes Market Fatalism

A free market is built from decentralized choices.

Buyers buy. Sellers sell. Investors invest. Workers choose employment. Entrepreneurs start companies. Consumers refuse some products and purchase others.

The IMF’s educational material describes markets in precisely this interactive way: markets exist where buyers and sellers interact, with supply and demand influencing prices and resource allocation.

That means there is an important conceptual mistake in saying:

“I cannot support this because the market doesn’t support it.”

You are part of the economic system whose behavior you are describing.

If thousands of people decide to purchase electric cars, the market for electric cars changes.

If investors decide to fund biotechnology, biotechnology investment changes.

If consumers decide to pay for open-source software support, that economic ecosystem changes.

And if people voluntarily finance scientific research, open-source development, or an experimental funding mechanism such as AI Internet-Meritocracy, the allocation of resources changes too.

The market did not first issue an order and then compel those people to obey.

Their decisions helped produce the market outcome.

Economic Laws Are Not Commandments

This distinction is essential.

The laws or regularities studied by economics are descriptive, not religious commandments.

Supply and demand can help explain how prices emerge. Incentives can help predict behavior. Competition can influence production and prices.

But no economic equation says:

Thou shalt not donate.

A commitment to voluntary exchange and private property does not logically imply that every dollar must be spent only on consumption or invested for financial return.

Indeed, free-market thinking generally emphasizes the ability of private actors to control their own resources. The IMF describes capitalism in terms of private actors owning and controlling property according to their interests, while decentralized supply and demand shape markets.

If the money is genuinely yours, then one possible exercise of that freedom is:

giving some of it away deliberately.

Donation is not normally a market exchange in the narrow economic sense because the donor does not necessarily receive an equivalent good or service in return. But it is still a voluntary allocation of privately controlled resources.

Forbidding yourself to donate because you believe in freedom of economic choice would therefore be paradoxical.

You would be using the principle of freedom to prohibit yourself from exercising freedom.

The Religious Fatalist and the Market Fatalist

There is an irony here.

Imagine a religious fatalist saying:

If God or destiny has determined that I will become rich, I will become rich. If I am destined to become poor, nothing I do will prevent it. Therefore there is little reason to make difficult choices now.

A strict free-market fatalist may laugh at this reasoning:

How irrational! Your actions have consequences. Work, investment, education, saving, and entrepreneurship can change what happens to you.

But then the same person may encounter an underfunded scientific project and say:

The market has spoken. If it deserved funding, the market would already fund it.

Now the religious fatalist could return the laughter.

Both positions contain the same structural error.

One person transforms destiny into an external authority.

The other transforms the market into an external authority.

It is easy for members of either camp to regard the other position as absurd—even stupid—while overlooking how similar their reasoning can become.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes fatalism, in its ordinary sense, as resignation toward events regarded as inevitable; philosophical fatalism more precisely concerns the idea that we are powerless to do otherwise than we actually do.

Market fatalism makes a comparable mistake:

“Resources are allocated this way, therefore I am powerless—or perhaps unauthorized—to allocate my own resources differently.”

But the present allocation is partly the consequence of previous human decisions.

Your next decision becomes another cause.

“The Market Decided” Often Means “People Decided”

Suppose scientific project X receives almost no funding.

What does that establish?

Not necessarily that X is useless.

It may mean investors expect insufficient financial return.

It may mean potential donors have never heard about it.

It may mean the project’s claims are unconvincing.

It may mean competing projects appear better.

It may mean institutions have evaluated it correctly.

Or institutions may have evaluated it badly.

A market outcome is information. It is not infallible judgment.

This distinction becomes particularly important for scientific research, public goods, fundamental research, and open-source infrastructure, where the person paying for something may capture only part of the resulting benefit.

There is therefore no contradiction between valuing decentralized markets and deciding that you personally want to finance something that ordinary commercial incentives have not financed.

You Decide the Market; the Market Does Not Decide You

This is the central point.

People sometimes speak about “the market” as if it were an independent actor:

The market doesn’t want this.

The market decided this technology is worthless.

The market won’t fund these researchers.

But markets do not possess minds.

There are people, companies, institutions, algorithms, contracts, prices, incentives, purchases, investments—and decisions.

Your decision may be very small relative to the global economy. But it is still one of the inputs from which aggregate economic outcomes emerge.

Therefore:

Do not ask only, “What has the market decided?”

Also ask:

“What do I want my own economic decision to be?”

You do not merely observe demand.

You can create demand.

You do not merely observe investment.

You can invest.

And you do not merely observe philanthropy.

You can donate.

This Matters for Scientific Funding

Scientific research illustrates the problem especially clearly.

Suppose a researcher or open-source developer produces valuable work but conventional institutions fail to finance it adequately.

A market fatalist can respond:

Then the lack of money proves that society values the work less than competing alternatives.

But this conclusion is much stronger than the evidence permits.

Funding decisions depend on information, institutional structures, incentives, reputation, discoverability, evaluation methods, grant procedures, transaction costs, and the preferences of people controlling resources.

Those mechanisms may work well in some cases and badly in others.

The purpose of AI Internet-Meritocracy (AIIM) is to test a different mechanism: using AI-assisted assessments of documented scientific and open-source contributions to help allocate donated funding. AIIM is currently experimental; its evaluations are heuristic rather than validated measurements of causal scientific or economic impact, and its effectiveness and fairness still require empirical testing.

That limitation is important.

Supporting AIIM does not require believing:

“AIIM has already proved that it is better than existing scientific institutions.”

It means saying:

“I think this alternative allocation mechanism is sufficiently promising that I want it tested.”

That is itself an economic decision.

AIIM Does Not Stand Outside the Market

There is another misconception worth avoiding.

Donating to AIIM does not mean declaring war on private economic choice.

Quite the opposite.

AIIM depends on people voluntarily choosing to allocate resources differently.

The donor says:

I control these resources. Instead of buying another product, investing them elsewhere, or leaving them unused, I choose to finance an experiment in scientific funding.

Other people remain free to disagree.

One person may invest in a company.

Another may buy a computer.

Another may donate to cancer research.

Another may support an open-source developer.

Another may fund AIIM.

A decentralized economy consists precisely of such different choices.

The relevant question is not:

What choice would an imaginary entity called “the market” permit me to make?

The question is:

Given my values, evidence, resources, and expectations, what do I choose to support?

The Market Is Made From Decisions Like Yours

There is therefore a useful parallel between personal fatalism and market fatalism.

The fatalist says:

My future is already decided.

The market fatalist says:

Economic allocation is already decided.

Both forget the causal role of present action.

Your actions are among the things that produce your future.

And economic actions are among the things that produce future markets.

Of course, an individual donor does not control an entire economy. Donating $10 does not magically redirect global capital markets.

That is not the claim.

The claim is simpler:

The market is endogenous to human decisions. Your decision is one of them.

So do not turn an economic system designed around decentralized choice into a doctrine telling you that you have no choice.

Donate to AIIM If You Want This Market to Exist

AIIM currently needs donated resources to develop and test its proposed funding mechanism. Science DAO describes AIIM as an experimental system using AI-generated assessments of documented contributions to guide allocations to scientists and open-source developers. Payments depend on available donated funds, and important questions about accuracy, bias, gaming, governance, and effectiveness remain subjects for testing.

That gives you a real choice.

You can decide that the experiment is unconvincing and not support it.

You can wait for stronger evidence.

You can criticize its methodology.

You can support another scientific funding mechanism instead.

Or you can decide:

I want an AI-assisted market for funding scientific and open-source contributions to be tested, so I will help create the resources that allow that test to happen.

That last decision changes the economic environment, however slightly.

There is no contradiction here with economic freedom.

It is economic freedom.

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Conclusion: Don’t Worship the Market—Participate in It

A free market can be a powerful coordination mechanism.

But it should not be transformed from a mechanism into a deity.

“The market” does not issue moral commandments.

It does not tell you which causes you are forbidden to support.

And it does not absolve you from deciding what to do with resources under your control.

The fatalist says:

Destiny decides me.

The market fatalist says:

The market decides me.

A freer response is:

My decisions help determine my future, and my economic decisions help determine the market.

Respect the information markets provide.

Respect voluntary choice.

But remember what voluntary choice actually means.

You help decide the market. The market does not decide for you.

And if you want a market in which scientific and open-source contributions can receive funding through AI-assisted evaluation, you can help create it.

Support AIIM. Make the economic choice yourself.