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From:
[log in to unmask] (Michael Perelman)
Date:
Sat Jul 28 19:20:45 2007
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I know of very few places where so many Hayek scholars reside.  I 
thought that you might offer a critique of the following:

The most widely accepted current justification for the market system is 
the ability of business to organize information necessary for an 
efficient system of production.  Frederick Hayek was the most 
influential exponent of this analysis, proposing that individual 
entrepreneurs developed expertise in knowing all that there was to know 
about their particular business.  Government planners with the 
responsibility of organizing an entire economy could never accumulate 
the necessary information for such a task.  Certainly no planner could 
ever match the collective distributed knowledge of the entrepreneurs.

Hayek never explained how global corporations the outputs of which 
matched that of a small or medium-sized economy were capable of 
organizing the requisite information, but the planning department of 
such a government would not be up to the task.

If, however, distributed knowledge is the key to efficient organization, 
then one might ask why not extend the principle further to take full 
advantage of the knowledge distributed among the workers.

Michael Perelman


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