No Planning

Here’s a letter that I sent today to the Wall Street Journal:

Crusading for a national
"energy plan" and upset that WSJ columnist Holman Jenkins isn’t on board, T. Boone
Pickens asks rhetorically: "My father used to tell me that a fool with
a plan is better than a genius with no plan. So I ask, what’s Mr.
Jenkins’s plan?" (Letters, Sept. 2).

Contrary to Mr. Pickens’s
assumption, an economy is not simply a gigantic business firm. An
economy is both incomprehensibly more complex than is even the largest
multinational corporation, and it has no specific, overriding purpose
comparable to a firm’s goal of maximizing profits – a purpose by which
the performance of each employee and each investment decision is
relatively easy to evaluate. So while plans and some measure of
central direction make sense for firms, comparable plans and direction
for an economy are poison. They prevent the on-going decentralized, competitive
experimentation from which spring not only progress that is unplanned,
but progress whose details could not have been foreseen before they
actually materialize.