Jackson Hole – Meeting of the Physics Envy Brigade
Planners Meet to Discuss the Impossible
The Jackson Hole pow-wow takes place this weekend. A more revolting get-together of actual and armchair central planners (i.e., the advisors to the planners, many of whom see themselves as planners-in-waiting) could hardly be imagined. One has to wonder how much more damage they will be allowed to inflict before someone finally says “enough!”. The parlous state of the global economy and the series of booms and busts we have experienced over the past 20 to 30 years are almost exclusively their doing (some of the responsibility has to be shared by politicians and other bureaucrats, who have hopelessly over-regulated and overtaxed economies, especially in the developed world).
Fed vice chairman Stanley Fischer, one of the keynote speakers at the Jackson Hole conference – more on him further below
Photo credit: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg
In their conceit these supposed “wise men” (we prefer the more fitting term “high IQ morons”, h/t Bill Bonner) seem to believe that bureaucrats can actually plan the economy and will deliver an outcome that is superior to that the free market would provide. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary that has amassed over what are by now centuries, they actually appear to be buying their own BS, which makes them especially dangerous.
As Ludwig von Mises has shown in 1920 already (in his seminal monograph Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth), central planning of the economy is literally impossible. Mises focused on the lack of a price system once the material factors of production are under government control and no longer freely tradable. Without proper prices, it is impossible to engage in rational economic calculation and hence it is no longer possible to properly allocate scarce resources.
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