Here’s a twenty year old article that could have been written yesterday. The money quote:
Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek has provided the answer: “It is through the mutually adjusted efforts of many people that more knowledge is utilized than any one individual possesses or than it is possible to synthesize intellectually; and it is through such utilization of dispersed knowledge that achievements are made possible greater than any single mind can foresee.”[9]
The market brings together the information possessed by all individuals in the market and, therefore, is able to make better decisions on questions of optimal resource allocation than can any group of bureaucrats. To try to identify “winners” and “losers” beforehand is folly.
Read the entire article, and ponder the fact that congress is about to get into the automobile manufacturing business. Other businesses will follow.
Are we about to learn, the very, very hard way, what European socialists already proved, namely that governments can’t run businesses and make them work? What they CAN do, of course, is interfere with business, and make it fail. That, in fact, is what happened in the recent mortgage finance debacle, and a large part of the reason for American automaker’s difficulties, namely the legal props for union muscle, and the requirements for various aspects of automobile design.
