Smile of the Day

The first two Smile of the Day postings of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II capture the two great men of the latter half of the 20th Century, who were great precisely because of their optimism.  Today's is another great man, a thinker rather than a doer perhaps, but whose ideas have great resonance today in an era of increasing governmental arrogance.  Ladies and gentlemen, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Friedrich von Hayek:

Hayek, of course, is best known for his great work, The Road to Serfdom, which argues against central planning of economies by governments on philosophical, logical and economic grounds.  The main insight of Hayek was crystallized in a paper entitled "The Use of Knowledge in Society," in which he concluded that a centrally planned economy was not just inadvisable, but logically impossible, because knowledge in society is dispersed and fundamentally unknowable:

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.

An indispensable corrective in the present era where, for instance, government bureaucrats think they can successfully run auto companies, the student loan industry, giant insurance companies, Wall Street, etc.   The political conflict in our society can be understood as a conflict of elites versus the Regular Guys; as the East and West Coasts versus Middle America; or as government bureaucrats versus individual entrepreneurs.   But, as Hayek suggests, perhaps the fundamental conflict is always between the arrogant who believe they know everything -- and, in particular, know what's best for us -- and the humble, who understand that there is always much that we not only don't know, but can never know.

The Road to Serfdom is a must-read for conservatives.  I also found rewarding the collection of Hayek essays entitled The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism.