Planned economies (was: Replies to Ron h and John Clark regarding...)

From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Fri Nov 15 2002 - 09:44:12 MST


On Fri, 15 Nov 2002, Reason wrote:

> The very fact that you speak of an "implementation" is a problem. Economies
> are not implemented; or at least ones that succeed are not. They just
> happen; an economy is self-organization in planned action and distribution
> of resources. The most efficient economies are those that are left alone by
> the State.

How about the "most efficient economies -- we know about to date --
are those that are left alone by the state"?

As Max seems to object -- you state the libertarian perspective as if
it is a "law of physics". It is certainly NOT that! While in the
past it has been obvious that the bulk of the computational capacity
organized towards personal or local optima has resided in human
brains, it seems highly unlikely that that will remain a valid
assumption in the future.

There seems to be a fundamental assumption in the libertarian perspective
that there can *never* be a computer/algorithm sufficiently complex that
it can optimize both local and global conditions (i.e. squeeze the
waste and redundancy out of the economy).

Given the Moore's Law advancement in computational capacity that will
soon shift over onto the nanotech based track giving us 1 cm^3 computers
with the capacity of 10^5 human minds -- I *really* have to question
whether local (personal) decisions will always trump global (planned)
decisions.

Just because prior economies that were "implemented" were not very
successful is no reason to assume that future economies that are
"implemented" will suffer the same fate.

Create an economy around the mining of an asteroid -- make the case
that a randomly generated economy will be more successful than a
planned economy at maximizing the utilization of those resources.

Robert



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