Sunday, April 04, 2010

Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Progressives can't get past the Knowledge Problem | Washington Examiner

True knowledge, when making federal policy, is actually important.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Progressives can't get past the Knowledge Problem | Washington Examiner

By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Contributor
April 4, 2010

"If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?" -- President Reagan, Jan. 20, 1981.

Economist Friedrich Hayek explained in 1945 why centrally controlled "command economies" were doomed to waste, inefficiency, and collapse: Insufficient knowledge. He won a Nobel Prize. But it turns out he was righter than he knew.

In his "The Use of Knowledge In Society," Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants and needs exists in no single place in any economy. The economy is simply too large and complicated for such information to be gathered together.

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