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I really do believe that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think the leftists for the past 60 years have acted with good intentions; they think

I really do believe that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think the leftists for the past 60 years have acted with good intentions; they think that they have been doing the right thing(s). However, they seem to do the same thing time and time again. Namely that they pretend to know all the variables regardless of context and argue that they are able to account for all variance via central planning. That is what Hayek called "pretense of knowledge". Nassim Taleb's Black Swan talks about that in depth. The failure to account for the "emotional" variable is what this article is about! In fact, that is the reason Econ is not a science. It is basically impossible to create rigid future-predicting economic models. Physics can do that because you can isolate and probe, while econ is far more complex of a structure where isolation of a variable is basically impossible. Even if you managed to do that it wouldn't matter because variables in aggregate tend to give rise to emergent properties. I think of economics as an NP-complete problem (perhaps even EXP). It might be possible to create statistical models that are "good enough" in most cases. But they are not deterministic or efficient. Therefor, I don't believe that centralized planning will ever work on these large scales.

B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
> I think the leftists for the past 60 years have acted with good intentions; If you look back a few more centuries, and check out what the brothers Gracchi, Gaius Marius and Julius Caesar were up to, you'll start to notice that money-less aristocrats have a knack of rallying the poor to their banner, so they can take the state from the moneyed aristocrats. That has happened a few more times, and rarely the poor have really profited from it. It's a tough game.
- demonshalo 10y ago
  Politics is about who gets when, where and how. That's all there is to it. Politics is about slicing the pie, not enlarging it.

B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago

> I think the leftists for the past 60 years have acted with good intentions; If you look back a few more centuries, and check out what the brothers Gracchi, Gaius Marius and Julius Caesar were up to, you'll start to notice that money-less aristocrats have a knack of rallying the poor to their banner, so they can take the state from the moneyed aristocrats. That has happened a few more times, and rarely the poor have really profited from it. It's a tough game.

demonshalo 10y ago
Politics is about who gets when, where and how. That's all there is to it. Politics is about slicing the pie, not enlarging it.