Markets economize on love, that most precious of values. They encourage cooperation and civility among disparate people. This was one of the great lessons of Kenneth Boulding, a Quaker economist who was founding editor of The Journal of Conflict Resolution. Boulding developed the concept of "Spaceship Earth" with the understanding that we're all in this together.

We should cherish social arrangements which foster harmony and inhibit conflict without requiring that people love one another. The ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, terrorism in the Mid-East, and discord in Canada are powerful reminders of perennial conflict among groups with differing values and goals.

While markets favor efficiency and profits, they also encourage diverse people to interact harmoniously. They promote civil, coordinated, and constructive social order. Here's a homey example.

Bozeman, Montana, a town with 30,000 people, has several supermarkets. Each offers valuable lessons. Although I shop them all, I know best the Albertson's by my office. It has tens of thousands of different items. There is evolutionary competition among stores, among brands within each store, and among products within individual brands. And between Albertson's and Safeway is the Community Food Co-op which offers an alternative blend of exotics and local, organic products.

These stores compete with differing mixes of service, economy, and products. Even the check-out lines vary in lengths and degree of service. Each grocer behaves as though he cares while seeking consumers with varying income, interests, and values.

Consumer preferences are continuously monitored at the check-out line. As clerks scan the products, consumer preferences are entered into the store's computer which adjusts inventory and orders. With their purchases consumers elect the stores and product lines they find most attractive.

Among stores and within stores, winners are determined by voluntary transactions. The losers gradually lose shelf space. Ultimately they either improve their products' appeal or disappear. The consumer really is sovereign. The market registers consumer preference and automatically adjusts to harmoniously reconcile changing demands with new supplies.

This process is quite remarkable. It demonstrates that, at root, the market is a social arrangement which efficiently generates information about people's wants and reservations while providing incentives to heed disparate, oft conflicting preferences.

Free and open markets offer a setting where each can satisfy his or her wants without imposing their preferences on others. The market process promotes diversity, freedom of choice, and innovations -- blessings in this imperfect world. Yet, there is another huge advantage we normally take for granted.

Though market efficiency is marvelous, the harmony fostered by voluntary exchange seems an even greater value, especially as inter-group conflict becomes so significant.

Market exchange by competent individuals, permits people with radically differing views to peacefully coexist. Like most college towns, Bozeman has many committed vegetarians. They shop peacefully and amicably with rancher and logger carnitarians, people who eat vegetables only as occasional concessions to health.

Ranchers mingle with Dallas blondes with big hair and Big Sky condos. Counterculture refugees of the 1960s mix with fun hogs who bounce among Montana's ski slopes, white-water rivers, and mountain trails. Vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists, teetotaling Mormons, and New Age vegans freely intermingle at Albertson's, Safeway, and the Community Co-op. These markets accomodate the teetotalers', and those for whom dinner implies good wine. When transactions are voluntary, interactions are peaceful.

Clear private property rights and free exchange foster civility and cooperation. Coercion doesn't occur with these institutions. Committed vegetarians and prohibitionists cooperated with those holding antithetical views.

What if grocery store management was political? Fighting would erupt between vegetarians and carnitarians; teetotalers and Epicureans; organic fanatics who protest pesticides and farmers who use chemicals; populists opposed to corporate agriculture and shareholders in those firms; working parents who want the stores open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and fundamentalists who believe they should be closed on Saturday or Sunday. Vegans might demonstrate in front while ranchers lobby managers in back. Supervisors would set prices according to interest group power. We then might see bread quotas, veal purchasing regulations, subsidies for union-labeled wine, and shortages common. Political power would trump consumer preferences, just like it does with public forest management today.

Since wealth and political power go together, the poor are usually advantaged when we move decisions from the political arena to the marketplace. They are usually disadvantaged when we decide politically.

Montana State University Professor Ramona Marotz-Baden summarizes, "Fortunately, we have pretty much kept these decisions out of the political arena. People make decisions and exercise their consciences instead of imposing their preferences by using the force of the state. Peace, progress, and efficiency are the result we have learned to expect."

No single set of institutions is perfect. There's an appropriate role for government, for public non-profit organizations (huge ones like The Boy Scouts and Nature Conservancy, or small ones like FREE and the Gallatin Institute), and for the marketplace. In general, there are strong ethical and material reasons to shift decisions away from government. Harmonious diversity is one of the best.