Yes, the technical aspects of network communication are relatively trivial. The actual economic planning absurdly difficult -- impossible, in fact. Friedrich Ha

Yes, the technical aspects of network communication are relatively trivial. The actual economic planning absurdly difficult -- impossible, in fact. Friedrich Hayek showed (and won a Nobel Prize for his work) that the coordination of production in the economy is achieved by using money as the channel of communication, which neatly encapsulates all of the information about preferences, substitutability, etc. Planned economies are necessarily subject to shortages and the like because it's impossible for any centralized entity to have all the knowledge about what the goals and needs of all actors are. The article argues against the establishment of a Central Pricing Board (advocated by Lange) by highlighting the assiduously dynamic and organic nature of market price-fluctuations, and the benefits of this phenomenon. He asserts that a centrally planned market could never match the efficiency of the open market because any individual knows only a small fraction of all which is known collectively. A decentralized economy thus complements the dispersed nature of information spread throughout society. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Society http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Society