"We Live In A Time Of Piecemeal-Planning & Incremental-Interventionism"
Submitted by Richard Emebing via EpicTimes.com,
Wherever we turn we are confronted with politicians, political pundits, television talking heads, and editorial page commentators, all of whom offer an array of plans, programs, and projects that will solve the problems of the world – if only government is given the power and authority to remake society in the design proposed.
Even many of those who claim to be suspicious of “big government” and the Washington beltway powers-that-be, invariably offer their own versions of plans, programs, and projects they assert are compatible with or complementary to a free society.
The differences too often boil down simply to matters of how the proposer wants to use government to remake or modify people and society. The idea that people should or could be left alone to design, undertake and manage their own plans and interactions with others is sometimes given lip service, but never entirely advocated or proposed in practice.
In this sense, all those participating in contemporary politics are advocates of social engineering, that is, the modifying or remaking of part or all of society according to an imposed plan or set of plans.
The idea that such an approach to social matters is inconsistent with both individual liberty and any proper functioning of a free society is beyond the pale of political and policy discourse. We live in a time of piecemeal planning and incremental interventionism.
The Reasonableness of Individual Planning
It is worthwhile, perhaps, to question this “spirit of the times,” and to do so in the context of marking an anniversary. Slightly over 70 years ago, on December 17, 1945, the Austrian economist (and much later economics Nobel Prize winner), Friedrich A. Hayek, delivered a lecture at University College in Dublin, Ireland on, “Individualism: True and False.”
At a time when socialist central planning appeared to be the “wave of the future,” Hayek argued that the true and essential foundation for any society wishing to preserve human liberty and assure economic prosperity was a rightly understood philosophy of individualism.
At the heart of Hayek’s criticisms of what he called the “false” individualism was the idea that individual human beings could ever have the knowledge, wisdom, or ability to design or remake a society according to some “rational” plan.
It is easy, no doubt, to fall into this error and mistaken belief. After all, we all undertake plans and design projects of action that we attempt to bring to successful fruition. The construction engineer, for instance, designs a technical blueprint for designing and building a bridge over a river or a tunnel through a mountain.
The individual private enterpriser works out a “business plan” about what product he might produce, the start-up investment and production costs that would be entailed, and the estimated consumer demand and stream of potential future revenues that would justify incurring the costs of bringing the business into existence and operation.
As private individuals we design, plan, and attempt to implement our own activities all the time, including going to college and earning a degree; or selecting and pursuing a particular profession, occupation or employment; or forming clubs and associations with others in society to pursue the fulfillment of any variety of “good causes” or shared hobbies and interests; or even the general life we might like to live in terms of achieving a sense of fulfillment, purpose, and happiness during our earthly sojourn.
Not to do all of these “planful” things, and many, many others of like kind, would leave our lives in disordered chaos and uncertain instability and confusion. Who, therefore, could be against or critical of wise, reasonable and “rational” planning of the society as a whole, in which we all live and work out our lives in interaction with multitudes of others?
Yet, that idea of the social designing and engineering of society as a whole by government and its central planners is exactly what Friedrich Hayek asked us not to assume or take for granted.
Human Knowledge is Divided and Dispersed in Society
Earlier in 1945, Hayek had published an article on, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in which he pointed out that a fundamental limitation on the ability to centrally plan the economic affairs of society was the inherent and inescapable division of knowledge in society.
The division of labor through which we cooperatively associate with each other to better achieve our various goals and purposes carries with it a matching division of knowledge. The specialized types of knowledge that each of us possesses in comparison to others in society can never be fully and successfully centralized in the hands of a set of government central planners without losing much of the content and richness of the diverse qualities of that knowledge that exist in different forms in each individual’s mind.
Hayek’s conclusion was that if all of that dispersed and decentralized knowledge that exists in the individual minds of all the members of society is to be effectively used and brought to bear for mutual improvement of the human condition, each of us must be left free to use that knowledge as we, respectively, think best and most advantageous.
Furthermore, our various actions using our individual types and bits of unique knowledge is best integrated and coordinated through a competitively-based free pricing system generated by the unhampered interaction of market supply and demand. (See my article, “F. A. Hayek and Why Government Can’t Manage Society,” Part I and Part II.)
Society is a Spontaneous Order, Not a Planned One
In this later lecture on “Individualism: True and False” (which was published in Hayek’s collection of essays, Individualism and Economic Order), Hayek argued that the true individualism starts from the premise that “society” is not some ethereal entity having an existence of its own, nor the designed creation of one or a handful of minds imposing a “plan” on people that produces the social order.
Instead, society is the cumulative and interactive outcome and result of multitudes of individual human beings making their separate individual plans that interact and generate connections and associations with other individual plans to produce the overall social order and its coordinated patterns.
If we think of language, custom, tradition, most rules of common etiquette and interpersonal conduct, and the general moral and ethical codes that prevail in a society we surely realize, upon a little reflection, that they are the cumulative outcomes of multitudes of generations of people whose interactions brought about these social institutions without which human association and cooperation would hardly be possible.
Once we realize this, we also understand that much of what we call “society” could not and was not designed because the forms, shapes and characteristics that it takes on could not have been anticipated or even imagined in all their detail and specificity as they emerged and evolved through historical time.
If the evolution and institutions of society had been limited to what a group of central planners could have known and designed, our society’s development would have been confined and limited to what that handful of minds had been able to image and understand, given their own personal and limited knowledge.
Or as Hayek expressed it:
The “basic contention is . . . that there is no way towards understanding of social phenomena but through our understanding of individual actions directed towards other people and guided by their expected behavior . . .
“It is the contention that, by tracing the combined effects of individual actions, we discover that many of the institutions on which human achievement rest have arisen and are functioning without a designing or directing mind; that, as [the eighteenth century Scottish moral philosopher] Adam Ferguson expressed it, ‘nations stumble upon establishments [institutions], which are indeed the result of human action but not the result of human design’; and that the spontaneous collaboration of free men often create things which are greater than their individual minds could ever fully comprehend.”
Though Hayek does not include it, the next passage in Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), is most pertinent to this point:
“It may with more reason be affirmed for communities [societies], that they admit of the greatest revolutions where no change is intended, and that the most refined politicians do not always know whither they are leading the state by their projects.”
Market Planning versus Political Designs
Those market experimenters and entrepreneurs of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who began to invest in mass production machinery in what became known as the “factory system” never imagined that their attempts to find ways to produce more and less expensive goods for mass consumption as the means to earning their personal profits would cumulatively generate what we now call the “industrial revolution,” with the economic transformation of unimagined rising standards of human living that has come from it over the last two hundred years.
Nor, more recently, could most, if hardly any, people have imagined the ways things would be changed and transformed in terms of everyday life through the development of computer technology. The first IBM computer occupied much of a city block in New York City. Who could have anticipated and planned for at that time that the later discovery and development of the microchip would revolutionize the world of communication and commerce in the way that has happened over the last few decades?
Yet, one hundred years ago, an American president entered the First World War to “make the world safe for democracy” and helped to set in motion a sequence of unintended consequences that, instead, resulted in twentieth century Soviet communism, Italian fascism and German Nazism.
And more recently, “anti-terrorist” nation building by U.S. government military intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have helped foster, instead, the emergence of religious fanatics and cruel murderers equal to or often worse than the tyrants the interventions were designed to overturn.
Knowledge-Using Institutions versus Great Men Politics
What inferences were to be drawn from the view of a free society as, primarily, a “spontaneous order,” the cumulative, and often the unintended outcome, of multitudes of human interactions, the results of which could never be fully or in many instances even partially anticipated in its rich texture and form, out of which has come many of the human betterments around us?
Hayek suggested that an important insight was to accept the fact that it was a false trail to be attempting to find wise leaders or super-human statesmen to guide society to a better future. The reality, he said, is that none have the wisdom or super-human talents and abilities to guide and direct human society.
The fact is, people are limited in their knowledge, abilities and talents, and are too often tempted to misuse and abuse any such positions of political power to benefit themselves and their associates at the expense of others in society.
The task, instead, Hayek said, is finding an institutional order in which the potential for such misuse and abuse is minimized and the widest latitude prevails for people to use their own unique and specialized knowledge and abilities in ways that not only benefit themselves but improve the conditions of many others in society, as well.
Explained Hayek:
The “chief concern was not so much with what man might occasionally achieve when he was at his best but that he should have as little opportunity as possible to do harm when he was at his worst . . .
“The main merit . . . of [political] individualism . . . is that it is a system under which bad men can do least harm; it is a social system which does not depend for its functioning on our finding good men for running it, or on all men becoming better than they now are, but which makes use of men in all their given variety and complexity, sometimes good and sometimes bad, sometimes intelligent and more often stupid. [The] aim was a system under which it should be possible to grant freedom to all, instead of restricting it . . . to ‘the good and wise’ . . .
“What the economists [of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries] understood for the first time was that the market as it had grown up was an effective way of making men take part in a process more complex and extended than he could comprehend and that it was through the market that he was made to contribute ‘to ends which were no part of his purpose’ [to quote from Adam Smith] . . .
“The true basis of [the individualist’s] argument is that nobody can know who knows best and that the only way by which we can find out is through a social process in which everybody is allowed to try and see what he can do.
“The fundamental assumption here as elsewhere is the unlimited variety of human gifts and skills and the consequent ignorance of any single individual of most of what is known to all the members of society taken together.”
Individual Freedom with Limited Government
If we take Hayek’s argument to heart, we must not only doubt but strongly challenge the arrogance and hubris expressed by all those in the public policy arena who assert a presumed knowledge to know how to guide, direct, redesign, regulate and plan the society in a manner better than allowing the free interactions of multitudes of individuals within a general system of individual rights to life, liberty and honestly acquired property, with enforcement of all contracts and agreements freely and non-fraudulently entered into.
As Hayek went on to say, this also implies a society in which individuals reap the benefits of all peaceful rewards they have earned, but also must be willing to bear the losses and disappointments when outcomes are not always to their liking.
Thus, while such a free society rejects any and all political forms of favor, privilege and artificial status, it also operates on the basis of market-resulting inequalities of material and other outcomes under a regime of impartial and equal individual rights before the law. Either all people are treated equally before the law with resulting unequal economic outcomes, or government treats individuals unequally in the attempt to assure more equal economic results.
Hayek ended his lecture with a question and an observation that is as relevant today as when he delivered it 70 years ago:
“The fundamental attitude of true individualism is one of humility towards the processes by which mankind has achieved things which have not been designed or understood by any individual and are indeed greater than individual minds. The great question at this moment is whether man’s mind will be allowed to continue to grow as part of this process or whether human reason is to place itself in chains of its own making.
“What individualism teaches us is that society is greater than the individual only in so far as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it.”
Which direction will the twenty-first century follow: individual free minds or politically managed minds? That is the question for all of us to answer.
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FREE TRADE PACK consists of 5500 pages of rules and regulations written by public government workers in secrecy.
Internet is allowing everyone to discover how unfree they really are.
There will be no real recovery what so ever!
The elite will soon run and hide in the bunkers paid for with citizens taxes, after engineering a full economic collapse as well as starting WW3, plus they will make sure that there are enough Jihadi's in the West to start a race war.
That should be enough to cover up the failed fiat ponzi scheme and take care of the 'excessive' population......
http://beforeitsnews.com/global-unrest/2016/01/the-lion-is-it-time-to-fi...
This is what WAR does to the ECONOMY >> https://goo.gl/15VRor
We will enslave you all.
Praise jewish jesus.
Answer to: For Ages We Shall Reign
Don't you dare associate Jesus with the jews.
http://biblicisminstitute.wordpress.com/2014/07/27/jesus-was-not-a-jew/
Shitty site and Rushdie never uttered anything so obtuse in his life.
And a few fatwas from the Salafists hardly represents every muslim.
It would be like blaming all Jews for the evils perpetrated by the jews who own the banks and media and us government.
;)
That's why I learned how to cook eggs inside grapefruit, this whole economy is about to collapse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtaLQ6Tl5ww
Deleted duplicate post.
Deleting yourself would be far better.
Well, at least he's a polite spammer. Missed first post, grabbed second spot on the initial reply thread, then came back and deleted his first miss. Honestly, I can't recall ever seeing such craftsmanship from any of the others.
Thank You, Mr. Polite Spammer Guy!
There is no state anymore. There is a two headed fascist monster of corporate and government power.
Tell me, how exactly can there be government power without a state?
If only words had meaning other than what each individual believes they are...
Funny how that bias called "I" works.
Beware excluded middles.
If any good can come out of this when it's all over, it'll be the end of the nation-state into smaller states and a separation of state and commerce.
Good post but naive.
The Joos have ALWAYS organized and ruled society.
the state is a complete and total fuck up. the future is going to suck but the poeple will be so dumb like the movie idiocracy it wont matter..............
Obamacare was not incremental.
MBS bailout was not piecemeal.
crap.
We live in a time when the genocide of 330 million Americans and 3 billion middle class across the globe being GENOCIDED is called SUSTAINAFUCKABILITY.
GENOCIDE is underway, and the PHYSICIANS are active participants. That's right. The AMA has a disclaimer on ICD 10 codes which are going to make hypocrites of those who take the Hippocratic oath.
Exactly. Mass poisoning with flouridation, vaccines and pharmacutical medicines. Mass malnutritution with a de-natured food supply.
It's no wonder the cost of "health care" is increasing in tune with increasing rates of metabolic diseases. Now that antibiotics have run their course, it would not surprise me if we see epidemics of infectious diseases.
I think this also has something to do with the dumbing down of the American public. They don't have the energy to think for themselves.
I just ride my bike, smoke plenty of weed, and eat healthy stuff when I get the munchies. I feel pretty damn good.
It's just made a lot of people plan on how to get the hell out of the New Rome!
Surely there is some place where the money is sound and I can smoke a cigar (?).
One of my favorite types of articles. No American Democrat or establishment Republican will read, understand or even accept any part of this.
I read some short articles about Democratic power and how exactly the wrong type of people are attracted to it.
The elitists I know ... and I know a lot, are just mediocre people (in so many ways) with an attitude.
I spent about 10 years up in the upper echelons of society through marriage and I concur. You'd think there would be exceptional character traits or at least wisdom, but not the case. Anxiety and obsessions in their wives and children was notable. The time spent decorating themselves via houses, wardrobes, jewels, where to say, and what to eat pretty much summed up their days. Superficial and continuously taking inventory of family and friends (gossip), passing judgment on less fortunate and pettiness despite their worldly lives and access to anything and everything they wish to do. The main money bags was typically a workahole or the offsping of a workahole whom everyone was kind to but hated.. The Will ... Who will get what.
And they probably taste terrible too. What use, the idle rich?
I'm kicking myself in the ass for not finishing my degree in " cat herding" at the Krugtard Skool of Keynesians.
All our societies are a "piecemeal planning". No conspiracy, it's just that societies are not a sum of individuals because most individuals don't matter. They in the hood getting crack In every part of history or our lives people try influencing one another. Starts in the familiy with yo mama telling you what to do when you are a kid. Sure enough this is parenting, but it definetly is mums and dads "piecemeal planning". Then the elders, peers, girls, etc.. Almost everyone has their theory on how we need to live and psychopats (not necceserely) are usually the ones to make them come to fruition.
If you take a look at Christianity, that one religion is an attempt by an unknown person/s to dominate others. Not in a bad way as 10 commandments are the foundation of western culture. And compare that to Odin's crew and rules or hinduism. Imagine a world where Vikings settled US when they were there in 1500s. Pillage and plunder as cornerstones of society and the only way to get to Valhalla is to die honorobly in battle. It would be a funky world. Oooo wait a minute...
Everything is a conspiracy. People plan things and do them. If they didn't, nothing woud be done.
Let me explain the essence of the Austrian economic advice for government:
To successfully manage an economy you must understand you cannot succesfully manage an economy.
The Fed's needle stayed in the arm so long, it became part of the arm.
Don't knock the Austrian school.
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TERM LIMITS
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“Individualism: True and False” (which was published in Hayek’s collection of essays, Individualism and Economic Order)
Collection of lies and individualist propaganda. Nothing, ever was achieved by individualists.
The individualist is easy prey for the 1% working collectively.
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Warren Buffett
The individualist is easy prey for the 1% working collectively.
It's been that way since the dawn of the human race, long before your perverted understanding of capitalism existed.
There is no such thing as a "collective". People are individuals, and groups are figments of your imagination. Nothing was ever achieved by a group, exept mass murder.
The Neo-Liberal ideal is unregulated, trickledown Capitalism.
We had unregulated, trickledown Capitalism in the UK in the 19th Century.
We know what it looks like.
1) Those at the top were very wealthy
2) Those lower down lived in grinding poverty, paid just enough to keep them alive to work with as little time off as possible.
3) Slavery
4) Child Labour
Immense wealth at the top with nothing trickling down, just like today.
This is what Capitalism geared to just maximise profit looks like.
The beginnings of regulation to deal with the wealthy UK businessman seeking to maximise profit, the abolition of slavery and child labour.
Thinking the wealthy will act as generous benefactors is a huge mistake and ignores the lessons of history.
It was organised Labour movements that got the majority a larger slice of the pie.
Where regulation is lax today?
Apple factories with suicide nets in China.
A leopard never changes its spots.
The Neo-Liberal ideal is unregulated, trickledown Capitalism.
How ridiculus! What you are describing in reverse is legally sanctioned plunder. You have a perverted understanding of what capitalism is in a free market.
free market?
Asset markets have never been free; its a misnomer. Capitalism is about power of money.
The US is a protectionist success story.
"If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it," wrote Adam Smith in 1776, "better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry, employed in a way in which we have some advantage. The general industry of the country will not therefore be diminished... but only left to find out the way in which it can be employed to the greater advantage."
When the UK was the workshop of the world in the 1800s the US and Western Europe caught up by forgetting all about Adam Smith.
The UK was the home of the industrial revolution and therefore had all the technological advantages.
The US and Western Europe used tariffs on UK manufactured goods to catch up with its more advanced technology. They didn’t follow Adam Smith and just buy UK manufactured goods.
If Adam Smith's ideas had been popular 100 years ago the UK would still be the workshop of the world and the US would be a third world agricultural nation.
The free market is a useful tool to stop others catching up.
This benefits the West when it has most of the advantages.
Unfortunately, Western businessmen have moved nearly all manufacturing to China for short term profits.
In China labour is cheap, but it also has a total disregard of intellectual property rights. The advantages of decades of product development and manufacturing expertise have been handed to China on a plate.
Global super power status moved from the UK to the US as the workshop of the world moved from the UK to the US.
Our businessmen have now moved the workshop of the world to China, global super power status will soon follow.
Batman the socialist you should read some history as you are totally wrong.
19 century UK proved tickle down Capitalism works. At the start of the century life was grim for the impoverished majority who were agriculural labourers ruled by a heriditory elite. During the century capitalism created businesses and the industrial revolution. Peasants moved to factory work and though poor, now had food and a shelter (so stopped dying of famine as in the past century). yes many were still poor but no-where as poor as in the previous century. Middle classes grew as clever and hard working lower class workers moved up through enterprise so by the end of 19century the self-improving middle-class business men were displacing the hereditary nobility. So
1 - The hereditary wealthy at the top were being replaced by self-improvers,
2. Those lower down stopped dying of famine (and many diseases like cholera were conquered) The health and wellbeing of the poor improved and the clever and hardworking moved up the strata.
3. slavery was abolished in early 19C UK
4. Child labour, which has been the norm for 1000s of years decreased, and the conditions of those children improved.
By todays standards the 19C was hard and grim, but compared to every century before 19C it was a vast improvement for every section of society (except for the hereditary nobility who lost power and wealth).
Read History and not just charles dickens. Everything is relative.
The rich have traditionally had a democracy that worked for them, when only they could vote and only they sat in Parliament and they used this power to line their pockets.
They came up with the Enclosures Acts to take away the Common Land of the people, leaving landless peasants who could no longer provide for themselves.
They now were in need of wages and ripe for exploitation in the factories and on the farms of the wealthy.
Men, women and children were made to work to keep the land and factory owners in the lap of luxury while they were housed in slums with just enough to keep them alive.
As Leo Tolstoy commented at the time:
“Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal – that there is no human relation between master and slave.”
It was Governments that had to abolish slavery and child labour through regulation.
In the UK the slave owners insisted on compensation for the loss of their property, the slaves got nothing.
Capitalism is productive, but left to their own devices those at the top will keep everything for themselves.
In the US and UK, social mobility is still very low by developed world standards:
http://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/medios/44582910.pdf
The US did away with UK hereditary titles but kept private schools and universities the main mechanisms of social stratification.
As the US moves further to the right, its middle class is being wiped out.
Capitalism is returning to its pure state.
Governments created slavery and institutional child labor systems. Where do you think all those children were going from those Dickensian orphanariums?
If the economic system was changed so that currencies were backed by the fruits of the peoples' labor rather than the ability of a powerful few to loan it into existence things would be VERY different!
Depends on the Individual : If he is part of the movers and shakers, the 1%, the diffuculty is not survival but how to spend your ill earned wealth. And the sleepless nights of WS's slides.
Hayek would have loved this vertically biased neo-liberal age of Reagan's creation.
Markets are for the Oligarchs not for the numbskulls we call middle class. That is now clear to even the most dumbed down.
The road to Capitalist serfdom played out by Hayek's step-sons Friedman and Greenspan has amply shown that :
THE CHICAGOOOO school of Interest rate Arbitrage.
As for the demand side conundrum (what Ronnie called "trickle down miracle") in a supply side world : ITS ALL BUILT on CONSUMER DEBt ramped up by Mike Milken's legacy : the high yield Junk Bond skyscraper of derivative packed "Blythe Masters CDS protected" soup, propagated by unending Reserve currency print by FED/TBTF cabal; la creme de la creme of Market economics--the monopoly kind which ensures Market dominance world wide !
The same mechanism which allowed Corporate America to ramp up the Asset market via M&A asset stripping in the name of supply side "efficiency", that had as collateral offshoring and labor lay-offs at home.
WHat a lovely world the debt conundrum of Supply Side Economics, so dear to Hayek, has created!
Individual liberties like Student loans .... hahaha!
This is the FACTUAL reality of what Hayek's political mentors (Reagan & Thatcher), the two neo-liberal kings of capitalism's catholicism, bequeathed the world.
This is not theory this is reality. Choose the world you want to believe in; theocratic economic dogma or its brutal reality.
Economic Wahhabism or economic pragmatism and secular balance.
Word salad.
The reality, he said, is that none have the wisdom or super-human talents and abilities to guide and direct human society.
The key then is to question this notion of desiring to create a given "society" in the first place. Where does this almost universally accepted control freak urge come from? And what lies beyond it, once this obsession is finally put to rest?
This is the question of our current age. What comes after the psychopaths have finally lost their magic, and people are at last freed from their slavery?
Set-Up: Obama Coordinated Iran Hostage Release for SOTU; Riverine Capture Scuttles?
Set-up? Navy Boat Capture with Woman Sailor (Iran); Final Decision Now About Women in Combat RolesWhat the heck is behind this Iran Riverine Boat thing? Two theory's from my cousin, John.