When British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher opined in an interview response to a question about public good provision that ‘There is no such thing!’ as government and that ‘people [should] look to themselves first’, she was reflecting the mood of the 1980s (Thatcher 1987). By the end of the 20th century, the view that liberal democracies had become too reliant on public sector social engineering to address social ills and that we needed to return to free-market individualism was becoming dominant. This thinking was rooted in the assumptions of the Austrian economists, a school of thinkers whose historical roots date back to the late scholastics of the 15th century who sought to justify the morality of commerce and profit-making (Rothbard 1998; Mises 1963; Hayek 1944). This group of economists diverged in some areas but held consistent beliefs about the efficiency and justness of markets, the prioritization of the individual over the collective, the virtue of market competition, and the importance of a minimal state. However, in an age of algorithmic optimization, where people's preferences are subtly influenced and shaped, do their assumptions still hold (if they ever did)? Do algorithms undermine the free market's reliance on independent judgement?

Key to understanding Austrian economists is the concept of subjective value. Because individuals differ in their tastes and preferences (and goods differ in their availability and utility to the individual), the value of goods lies within individuals – not inherently in goods themselves.