The Fatal Conceit

by Bill Bonner
Acting Man

Don’t Plan on Living in St. Petersburg…

GENEVA, Switzerland – When we left you last week, we were describing why neither democracy nor planning works on a large scale. Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek described the problem with great thoroughness in his book The Fatal Conceit.

[…] The Fatal Conceit: central economic planning is literally impossible – there can be no centrally planned rational economy. Individual planning is distinct from central planning, in that the many individual plans pursued by self-interested individuals mesh and create a spontaneous order. This order is far superior to anything that a central planning agency can ever hope to achieve – in fact, as Mises has shown, central planning is even doomed to failure if the planners hypothetically had perfect knowledge of all facets of the economy at a given time. However, this hypothetical situation can can never be realized anyway, as knowledge is widely distributed and as Hayek argues, is often tacit and therefore not directly communicable. It only expresses itself in human action.

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