it has come to my attention that many free marketeers often make ridiculous arguments against planning that many pro-planners laught at and make easy counter-arguments. for example the claim that planning is only good at the primitive level and that far reaching planning always magicly results in a tower of babel. cmon people. watching stossel's skating ring example is actually false. skating can be coreographed and large events like the olympics dont just happen out of spontaneous order.
whats more is the confusing of "doesnt work" with statism. slavery and feudalism "worked", yet they were hardly based on free association. mises writes that human economics is profoundly different than animal life and many others after him make it clear that the market is NOT a nature in tooth and claw. yet a vast majority of free marketeers make the same stupid comparison between the ecosystem (which btw is full of rape, murder and theft) to show that the invisible hand can guide us all.
this is not a stupid rant but a reminder that libertarian and especially ancap talking points should be more cohesive lest we become daily jokes for bearded commies in a grenwich village pub.
Yes, skating can be choreographed. But that's voluntary in the sense that all the people want to perform the vision that the choreographer has.
Stossel wasn't denying that planning can happen. I don't know how you got that.
the point is voluntary versus involuntary. for one thing one cannot claim that the ecosystem is an order because there is no way to distinguish order from disorder. the simple fact that market responds to human ends proves that it is not incidental but merely indirect. to take stossel idea further is the biblical parable about the "birds and the lilies of the field". we dont have to do anything, things will just magicly "work"(by work they mean live).
the programs main point is itself confused. first he blamed the govt and praised voluntarism, then he hints that large projects never get things done. an ancap community can set up guidelines for building contractors in their say, historic district, and make 500 page guideline books.
im a computer technitian and i often get frustrated by 400 page manuals i have to read before i can set up a server. but something cannot be dismissed just because it has too many hurdles. again, too complex is not an excuse.
Speaking of incoherent...
my point is very simple. critics of socialism or more specificly, large scale planning often confuse three things together
1. massive planning
2. workability
3. voluntarism
since most recent examples of socialism employed massive planning, were unworkable and were involuntary, people readily confuse involuntary state-socialism with complex planning. claiming that any massive plan will fail because its "too bearocratic" and has too many hurdles. but they fail to see that just because the govt cant rebuild new orleans through involuntary statist means doesnt mean it hasnt been done before. the piramids themselves are monuments to brutal statism and slave labor.
this mentality hence creates the prevailing view of average joes that despite that the western world is not a free market, there exists a abritary line of too much statism that renders our already statist system unworkable!
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