Here was my parting shot.
The Welfare Economics Paradigm is so easy to diagram on a blackboard, and its conclusions make presumptive social engineers comfortable with their prejudices. Peter Boettke notes, though, that for blackboard economics to work, the people who implement policies must behave in exactly the fully-informed, public-spirited way the model dictates.
Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux
reminds us they don't.
Interventionists typically describe lovely outcomes and then posit a handful of measures for government officials to impose – measures for ham-fistedly prohibiting this large class of actions, penalizing that other large class of actions, and subsidizing yet some other other large class of actions. Selling their schemes to the public in terms of excellent promised outcomes, the means that interventionists propose for government to use to achieve these outcomes – and to do so without giving rise to worse unintended consequences – are never formulated and calibrated to account for the great, unseen complexity of the economic and social phenomena that must be successfully rearranged if the interventionists’ schemes are to have any hope of successfully achieving the interventionists’ stated goals.
Humility, though, has
not been a personality trait of technocrats.
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