Now that Keynesianism is receiving last rites, we can hope that the next progressivist idea to fade from the scene will be... wait for it... central planning itself!
Robert Tracinski flogs that old canard unmercifully in this paean to free market ingenuity, pointing out that again and again government planners have had even worse luck than the futurists who regularly fail to predict next year's next big idea much less the hundreds of new ideas of the next decade.
Why is that?
Friedrich von Hayek nailed the weakness... no, the folly of central planning before the middle of the last century when he identified the economic calculation problem: that no group of planners can have sufficient knowledge of the entire state of an economy or sufficient intellectual capacity to keep up with the pace of the decisions required to keep the economy from grinding to a halt.
Sound familiar? Stalin's total control of the Soviet economy was sufficient to bring a worker's paradise. Mitt Romney's commissions of the smartest guys in Massachusetts health care were surely enough to plan the Commonwealth's way out of its health care dilemma. Obama was intellectually gifted enough -- or so our best tingly-legged media minds told us -- to guide us out of the deepening recession and keep unemployment below 8%. But those efforts only made things worse.
The strength of our economy, its vibrant source of energy, has always been the individual economic liberty to make plans and choices on the economic spot on the basis of prices freely determined, and to be rewarded by the success of those choices or responsible for their failure.
And now those individual plans and choices include the political calculation to wait out silly exhortations to "Pass this bill now!" until the source of the irritation is removed. Here, Walter Russell Mead explains that the President's third or fourth new jobs plan -- it's certainly no bill yet -- is just that much more mush from the wimp, of which expression the explanation will surely delight.
