Rick Lowe
Most political pundits think the general elections will be very late this year or early in 2012, so pretty soon we'll all be privy to the thoughts of those that believe they can "run the country" when they release their party platforms.
They'll all design a perfect country I'm sure. They'll only have to spend more taxpayer money and of course borrow just a bit more to get it all done. Not to mention how they'll pass laws or establish more bureaucracies and these will solve our problems. "Just a bit more government and we'll get it right," they'll implore.
I'm skeptical of course and point to Friedrich A. von Hayek's speech to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 11, 1974 when he accepted his Nobel Prize for economics for guidance.
In his speech entitled The Pretense of Knowledge, the new Nobel Laureate tells us:
"If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants. There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, "dizzy with success", to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals."
Read his entire speech here… http://bit.ly/8XCOAo
If I can recommend a book to you, I suggest you read The Fatal Conceit, by Professor Hayek.
Oh, and here's my favorite quote of all time by him:
"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account." The Fatal Conceit : The Errors of Socialism (1988), p. 76
As we prepare ourselves for silly season Hayek provides some sound advise. Let's hope the political class will listen.
