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by WillPostForFood
2183 days ago
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His critique goes well beyond just the quantity of data. This is, perhaps, also the point where I should briefly mention the fact that the sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form. His bigger argument though, is even if it were effective, it is inherently undemocratic. It will often be necessary that the will of a small minority be imposed upon the people |
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He makes the point that so long as everyone is on the same page, working to the same goal, central-planning can be very effective. We can see this historically when a nation unites in defense, as America (and much of the world) did during WWII.
But when every person has their own goals and values, the central planning is no longer able to work effectively. It's not simply that it's hard to optimize that many functions at once, but that much more fundamentally, it's impossible for the central planner to know what those individual functions even are.
So the titular road to serfdom is when we agree to unite toward a central goal and thus subject ourselves to the central planning, that central authority can't easily be removed later when the shared goal has been achieved. Thus we find the central authority acting as an obstacle toward the individual goals that we've returned to.