Comment Re:Reminder of who not to credit (Score 1) 151
I'm curious how a command economy with what amounts to a captive labor force runs out money.
Hayek wrote a book about this question- The use of knowledge in society. A quote:
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.
To put it another way, no communist politburo can centrally manage the knowledge necessary to make a modern economy work. There's simply too much to know. In a market economy, the participants know how to play their role, and how to get what they need to give their customers what they want. They need to know nothing more than that. Millions of such people quietly playing their own role delivers success. In a command economy, the politburo pretends to be able to manage all the knowledge and decision making required throughout the economy- and this is an impossible task.