It is the old familiar dream of the central planner, an orrery economic universe in which things move in predictable and comprehensible patterns. That model of the economy has no relationship to reality. A million different things might become of any given laid-off steelworker; predicting what would happen to an entire industry’s work force (or even a small portion of it) in the absence of a certain protectionist policy is not economics — it is speculative fiction. For the most part, we do not have a very good record for predicting the effects of policies; trying to build a set of policies on an intellectual framework consisting of imagined counterfactuals will fail for the same reason that wage and price controls fail, agricultural-market management fails, and those highly targeted “investments” every president proposes in every State of the Union address fail: Human civilization is not an ant farm that can be viewed in cross-section and comprehended in total.
The real world is populated by politicians and lobbyists rather than philosopher-kings, but a government of philosopher-kings that tried to micromanage the economy in the way Beattie suggests would fail, just as all similar attempts at putting the economy under political discipline have failed. Right-wing central planning is as foolish as left-wing central planning.
Kevin D. Williamson, “Right-wing central planning is as foolish as left-wing central planning”, National Review, 2017-06-12.
June 26, 2019
QotD: “Right-wing central planning is as foolish as left-wing central planning”
Comments Off on QotD: “Right-wing central planning is as foolish as left-wing central planning”
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
