touchstone archives
Commonplaces
Piquant excerpts lifted from Touchstone editors' own reading & listening.
In centrally planned economies, we have seen the planners overwhelmed by the task of trying to set literally millions of prices and keep changing those prices in response to innumerable and often unforeseeable changes in circumstances. It was not remarkable that they failed so often. What was remarkable was that anyone had expected them to succeed, given the vast amount of knowledge that would have had to be marshalled and mastered in one place by one set of people to make such an arrangement work. Lenin was only one of many theorists over the centuries who imagined that it would be easy for government officials to run economic activities—and the first to encounter directly the economic and social catastrophes to which that belief led, as he himself admitted.
—Thomas Sowell
Basic Economics, 4th ed. (2011)
— Politics — Commonplaces #179 — Sept/Oct 2023 —
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