WE AGAIN FAIL BECAUSE WE IGNORE HISTORY

Central planning, such as is used in collectivist nations, always fails. When government plans an economy, the economy is certain to fail. It always has and always will. When bureaucrats believe they are better at planning what companies should produce, or how companies should run their businesses, the economy is certain to fail. It always has and always will. The American Left is telling us government must plan the economy.
Bureaucrats to often come from academia, where they have taught theory, and seldom to they come from the real world of business where they have run a successful business. The theorists make decisions based on factors other than results. Business executives make decisions based on what the consumer is telling them they want and need.
We are seeing this difference in the energy industry for example. The bureaucrats are telling us that, for their own reasons, we must rely on wind and the sun for our energy needs. This sounds good to some, but it has not, can not produce the energy necessary to run our economy today. It might have worked prior to the automobile, electric lights, air conditioning and heating, prior to a modern economy. Those central planners today who are calling for us to abandon fossil fuel energy are doing all that has brought failure because of central planners of the past.
When you boil it down, large-scale central planners fail because they believe three things that aren’t true.
First, that they know current conditions (wants, desires, hopes, capabilities, resources). In other words, that they know the exact and entire present state of the community they are planning for.
Second, that they know where the community ought to go; that is, that they know what the future ought to be.
Third, that they are capable of creating the future they want.
None of those things is more than an illusion. Together, they constitute what F. A. Hayek called “the fatal conceit that man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes.”
Central planners have lived in an imaginative world in the past and they live in an imaginative world today.