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[personal profile] asher553
F.A. Hayek observes in 'The Road to Serfdom' (ch. 3) that big-government advocates like to use the term "planned economy" to mean a CENTRALLY planned economy, implying that a free-market model "within which the various activities would be conducted by different persons according to their individual plans" is really no plan at all. For them, only a "central direction of all economic activity according to a single plan" is worthy of the name "planned".

This is a good example of the two views of knowledge as either distributed or concentrated, as put forth by Thomas Sowell in 'Intellectuals and Society'. And in fact I was reminded of the anecdote Sowell cites near the beginning of the book, about a humorous verse that was written about Benjamin Jowett of Balliol College at Oxford:

My name is Benjamin Jowett.
If it's knowledge, I know it.
I am the master of this college,
What I don't know isn't knowledge.

Only centrally-controlled knowledge is deemed to be "knowledge" in this view, and similarly, only centralized planning is true "planning".

May 2025

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