Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Biotech / Medical : Coronavirus / COVID-19 Pandemic -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (414)	4/1/2020 4:59:19 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 22886

Not much to do with "government is the problem". More to do with the knowledge and calculation problems. Its not a call for reducing government or even against expanding it (although I'm generally not a fan of government expansion. Its a point against central planning. You can have a large active government without trying to centrally plan the economy. The relevant quote isn't "government is the problem" but rather - “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.” It is true that the virtue of private companies is that if they screw up badly enough, they will go out of business. But governments can be corrected too Governments tend to try, often successfully, to use their own screw-ups as reasons to give them more power and control. As for competence, no one is competent to manager the economy (that's not a weakness of government in particular, grab some business leader, even the most innovative, and competent of them, and he won't be able to do so either). To the extent that you think the current president is more incompetent then most, well that's just one more reason not to have a government that he leads try to micromanage the economy.