How planning feeds on itself

Edward Feser, in a Claremont Review of Books (Spring 2019) essay on Frederick Hayek, explores how central planning inevitably leads to, well, even more central planning.

Human knowledge is severely limited. A mind can only ever understand what is less complex than it. Hence, no human mind can ever understand itself, much less the vast aggregate of human minds--each with its own unique and ever-evolving needs, and each with its own idiosyncratic body of information concerning local economic circumstances--that constitutes an economic system. This is the deep reason why socialism is impossible in principle, and always leads to chaos when attempted. The central planner simply cannot have all the information required to allocate resources or direct economic activity rationally.

To remedy this problem, the planner has to dictate, rather than learn, what individual economic actors need and how they will behave. For the only sure way to know what they want and what they will do is to decide for them what they should want and what they should do. And the more closely economic planners want outcomes to conform to their plans, the more thorough this dictatorial control will have to be. {Editor's note: consider California and Silicon Valley's residential zoning and regulatory schemes in this light}

This is the sense in which Hayek thought socialism entails "serfdom." He say saying that centrally planning large-scale economic outcomes requires large-scale control of economic behavior. Planners will have to increase control if they are intent on realizing their plans.

Read the whole thing here.

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