… is from pages 465-466 of F.A. Hayek’s profound and important 1964 article “Kinds of Order in Society” (available without charge on-line here) as it appears in Liberty Fund’s 1981 single-volume collection of New Individualist Review:
It is, in other words, our restricted horizon of knowledge of the concrete facts which makes it necessary to coordinate our actions by submitting to abstract rules rather than to attempt to decide each particular case solely in view of the limited set of relevant particular facts which we happen to know.
DBx: Although often unaware of the implications of their arguments, proponents of industrial policy imply that they, or the government officials who will conduct industrial policy, can achieve the impossible – namely, to achieve godlike knowledge both of the vast and disparate details of the present, and of the particular ways that today’s manipulation of these details will play out the future.
