My “trust” in the market may be like my trust in simple facts of nature—it is merely confidence from induction. I will correct specific details of my confidence when any dealer out there violates it, but I will otherwise treat each dealer as benign, at least in the sense of not malign. If I share Adam Smith’s view that most dealers are likely to share my interests (because they must serve my interests to serve their own), I may even think of them as actively benign. I can do this because dealers are typically in competition with other dealers and they must live by their reputations and by the development of ongoing customer bases.

XREF: Connects to Adam Smith's concept of self-interest serving mutual benefit, and broader epistemic questions about induction from Hume.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 833