> A Hayekian would say that's what The Market is about - a
> decentralized, spontaneous organizing principle that's smarter than
> any central planner could ever be.
The phrase "central planner" is ambiguous. Planning carried out by "universally developed," "freely associated" producers would, given the meaning of "universally developed" and "freely associated", be, by definition, the smartest imaginable organizing principle. It would be an essential aspect of fully actualized "freedom".
The ethical ideas implicit in this idea of planning (Marx's) also provide the basis for Keynes's rejection of Hayek's claims about planning in the otherwise flattering letter he wrote to Hayek about Road to Serfdom, i.e. for his claim in that letter that: "Dangerous acts [such as 'planning'] can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly."
Ted
-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20061206/de980d97/attachment.htm>