F.A. Hayek wrote in The Fatal Conceit, “the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
We need to be careful that this differs materially from "the curious task of auronautics engineers" circa 1900. One place it surely does differ is that we've quite a few more people on this plane of the economy than on any test flight. We should, indeed, be correspondingly more careful.
That said, "be careful" and "do nothing" are two very different propositions. Being careful may motivate doing nothing, or it may motivate doing quite a lot. While I don't think it was present in Hayek's reasoning, this frequently spills over into something that looks like "We're dealing with people's lives/rights here! How can you be so crass as to talk about numbers and make decisions?" When things are difficult and important, that's precisely the time you need to be most careful in your reasoning.
Abstaining is still an action. Proposals for reduced or constrained intervention are still proposals, and only deserve reduced scrutiny to the degree that they are supported by "we've done that before and it worked out well".
That said, "be careful" and "do nothing" are two very different propositions. Being careful may motivate doing nothing, or it may motivate doing quite a lot. While I don't think it was present in Hayek's reasoning, this frequently spills over into something that looks like "We're dealing with people's lives/rights here! How can you be so crass as to talk about numbers and make decisions?" When things are difficult and important, that's precisely the time you need to be most careful in your reasoning.
Abstaining is still an action. Proposals for reduced or constrained intervention are still proposals, and only deserve reduced scrutiny to the degree that they are supported by "we've done that before and it worked out well".