Saturday 28 November 2015

The Suffocation of Economic Central Control


Centralised control, whether 'the state' acting as if the market or, ostensibly, the 'market' acting as if 'the state', fails (as does tickling yourself fail to raise a chuckle).  What central 'control' is supposed to do is 'sense and react' and therein lays the two fundamental problems:

1/. the input is always going to be faulty (how can such a system be sensitive enough, accurate enough, smart enough to take account of every permutation)?
2/. the output is always going to be faulty (how can such a system be reactive enough, delicate enough, effective enough to take account of every permutation)?



And that does not take account of the two secondary problems, (problems that would remain even if the system of centralised control, be it faux market or state, did not suffer from the two fundamental problems):

a/. the centralised control is always going to attempt to manipulate the market by way of attempting to provide favourable conditions bias to suit its own agenda
b/. the faulty outputs and bias manipulation of the centralised control will distort the market away from the form it would otherwise naturally be drawn to.


Centralised control treats the economy as though it is one big thing and that then all the micro commercial activities will feed from that initiative, as if little piranhas swarming onto whatever gigantic carcass has been fed to them.  That may be fine for feeding identical fish but the economy is rightly comprised of totally disparate elements - it is an ultimately diverse ecosystem.

The great thing about diverse ecosystems is that, left alone, they manage themselves.  There is still a form of centralised control of economies but that is because: each and every element of the whole is a self regulating economy in itself.  The effect of each element, free to act in its own best self interest, is that a system of each element's independent economy acts upon a plethora of spontaneous and autonomous sub-economies to effectively create a whole.


It is not only imposable to replicate or replace the effectiveness of this type of system, it is unnecessary to try (unless the intention of influencing is for one sub-economy to do so in order to attempt to change the whole for reasons of self-interest).  It is unnecessary to try to replicate a system of sub-economies because: since the sub-economy system is so refined and reactive it cannot be bettered for servicing the interests of the sub-economy system as a whole.

There is no such thing as 'the economy', it is just a conceptual idea to explain the 'system of sub-economies' as a whole, just as there is not such thing as a forest, that is just a word for the conceptual idea of many trees, plants, animals living together in one place, symbiotically acting as a if a whole too.

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