… is from page 371 of Robert Higgs’s March 2002 essay “Thank God for the Nation State?” as this essay is reprinted as Chapter 40 of the excellent 2004 collection of some of Bob’s essays and papers, Against Leviathan:
A centrally planned economy, by its very nature, suppresses the only means – free transactions in private property rights – by which a movement toward an “optimal” allocation of resources might be set in motion.
DBx: Yep.
Industrial policy merely suppresses this means less fully than does full-on central planning. But the suppression is nevertheless real and harmful.
