The most important question in economics is why the nation-state isn’t just organized as one big, administered enterprise (i.e., a form of state socialism). The usual answers take ‘the market’ to be normative and talk about ‘inefficiencies’, but this is misguided.
You can flip the issue around and avoid taking ‘the market’ as the default: every economy would be one big, administered enterprise; the convoluted structure we call the ‘market economy’ appears due to ‘state intervention’; specifically laws of property, trust, etc.
The ‘varieties of capitalism’ are actually varieties of (state) socialism. Different countries have more or less convoluted administrative structures (i.e., further from default managerialism) depending the degree to which policy has been informed by the discipline of economics.
In other words, the entire ’market economy’ is a performative construct. Where economics dominates, laws and regulations have been created in such a way that people are forced by the state to administer industry in a way that conforms to economic theory. Elsewhere, less so.
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