In “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” economist F.A. Hayek described how markets take into account an array of local knowledge that governments do not possess. It is “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place,” which enters into everyday exchanges, but central authorities cannot access it. That’s because it “never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” This sort of knowledge is tacit and subjective, so “by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form.”
Cato adjunct scholar Jeff Singer is a surgeon practicing in Phoenix, and his op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal illustrates Hayek’s point. The federal government has mandated that health providers adopt electronic records to the specifications of the central planners in Washington. A theme in Jeff’s piece is that there is tacit and localized aspects of his practice that the government did not know about, and did not bother to find out about, before it imposed its top-down rules.
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/hayek-vs-government-health-care
No comments:
Post a Comment