Wow! I never thought I would read a columnist in a car magazine using a Hayekian argument! But here it is, in the March 2009 edition of Motor Trend magazine. In "Prius or Pickups?", Angus Mackenzie states: "If no one can figure out what vehicles American consumers will buy from one month to the next, how on earth is Capitol Hill going to be able to determine in which direction Detroit's salvation lies?"
That, folks, is the big question. Even if we were to accept the absurd premise that the state's role is to play deus ex machina for selected players in the economy, while the rest of us remain subject to the strictures of the self-regulating market, how could it possibly know what to do? How could one car czar, or a board of ten or a hundred or even a thousand experts, possibly replace the combined knowledge and experience of three hundred million market participants making billions of rational decisions?
Let's pretend for a moment that morality had nothing to do with economics--not hard for modern economists--how could Plato's and Marx's and Keynes' enlightened elite possibly muster the requisite knowledge to make all the decisions on behalf of all members of society?
