Paraphrasing Hayek

I leave you guys with a paraphrase of passage from Hayek, my most important intelectual influence. Socialistic or statist central planning fails because socialistic ideologies are the confusion of society with the micro-cosmos of family and friends.

"Our individual inventiveness caused the formation of our current economic and social structure, which contains the largest amount of useful resources (wealth) in history. As a consequence, individuals have come to believe that society, a group of de facto strangers outside of family and friends, can deliberately design the whole of society in the same way we have design our small but ingenious contributions to the familiar level.

In the minds of most people, the mere existence of such a massive social structure, that extends beyond the micro-cosmos of our family and friends, is sufficient to think that the macro-cosmos of society can also be designed deliberately. Although this is an error, it is a noble one. As noble as it is, it is a grandiose, ambitious, magnificent, and daring error to think that society can be design as individuals design their micro-cosmos."

The Fatal Conceit, pg. 75