Why central planning falters

Why do government programs so often deliver dangerous and unintended consequences? Edward Feser in Claremont Review of Books (summer 2019) analyzes Fredrich Hayek's insights into human limitations.

"According to Hayek, 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 the economic planner wants outcomes to conform to his plan, the more thorough this dictatorial control will have to be. This is the sense in which Hayek thought socialism entails 'serfdom.' He was 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 the plan."