Dakota Beacon

Why does the big government control mentality of statists like Barack Obama always create misery? Economist Steven Horowitz provides a partial answer in a thought-provoking piece in The Freeman Online.

The bottom line is that socialist planners attempting to abolish markets, but interested in efficiency, would have no way of knowing what people value, so they would be unable to determine what outputs to make from a given set of inputs or which inputs to use to make any particular output. They would not be “planning;” they would be stumbling around in the dark and the result would be economic chaos and poverty.

All true, But Horowitz does not discuss a major factor. Leftists with agendas and over-inflated egos, like our radical president, envision an omnipotence in "planning" the economy. The Obamas of the world offer The Plan, a plan to end all plans. People like Obama never, not for the briefest moments, see themselves as "stumbling around in the dark." Instead, the Obamas believe that the stupid unclean masses struggle to grasp the beauty of theoretical economics that never work because stupid unclean masses are too stupid, too unclean to make the brilliant schemes work. "Chaos" and "poverty" are merely temporary side-effects that should eventually go away if the stupid unclean masses ever wise up, embrace leaders with plans, and behave as the leaders specify.

Horowitz points out something relevant to my point.

Even the smartest, best-intentioned people would be unable acquire the knowledge necessary to improve on the market.  This is the major structural problem government faces – and notice that it does not require assumptions of malevolence or incompetence.

The economist has captured an age-old reality: No planners can know everything. And everything is close to what an anointed group of central planners, such as the academics that Obama has assembled, would have to know in order to orchestrate a perfect economy. Evil intentions and incompetence may be present, but central planning must fail and will always fail even if planners' intentions are pure and competence is top notch. The undeniable truth is that:

Central planners can never know all that it is necessary to know in order to plan the market.

The stark truth constitutes good news and here's why. Just as Presidents Wilson, FDR, and LBJ failed to do anything but devastate the economy, so too will Obama do nothing but hurt the economy. Obama will fail--in a huge way--and the failure will be good for the future because today's Americans are not like FDR's Americans. The American people today will not long tolerate failure on so grand a scale as Obama will orchestrate. The cleansing of the massive failure will begin in 2010 and kick into high gear in 2012.

But the cleansing must be a nonstop process. The socialistic romantics in media and academia will not easily release the iron grip on America. In fact, the groups will fight the purge at every step. It is the job of clear-thinking voters to render the media and academic elitists irrelevant by making it obvious through voting choices that the socialistic era is dead.

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© 2010 Chuck Rogér