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Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue (Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, The)" by F. A. Hayek, Stephen Kresge, Leif Wenar and wanted to share this quote with you.

"HAYEK: I would still aim at completely eliminating all direct interference with the market—that all governmental services be clearly done outside the market, including all provision of a minimum floor for people who cannot make an adequate income in the market. [It would then not be] some attempt to control the market process but would be just providing outside the market a flat minimum for everybody. This, of course, means in effect eliminating completely the social justice aspect of it, that is, the deliberate redistribution beyond securing a constant minimum for everybody who cannot earn more than that minimum in the market. All the other services of a welfare state are more a matter of degree, how they are organized. I don’t object to government rendering quite a number of services; I do object to government having any monopoly in any case. As long as only the government can provide them, all right, but there should be a possibility for others trying to do so."

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If central planning cannot effectively manage the economy, then why is central planning used to manage the myriad needs of public welfare tasks? If not, how should public welfare work be managed?

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Jul 27, 2021
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Wasn't there some work on that not so long ago suggesting that possibility? When I was at B-School in the 1980's we had Stafford Beer as a visiting professor whose cybernetic ideas for hierarchical control of the economy were based on cybernetics and were supposed to have been used by the Allende government in Chile before Allende was overthrown. I still have Beer's "The Heart of Enterprise" and I do sometimes wonder whether modern computing with servers and edge devices with the relevant algorithms and ML might be the way that such a system could be successfully implemented. Maybe when our robot overlords take over, it will be. ;)

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Sounds like something that Jeff Bezos would be *happy* to implement, and may well be working on. After all, when you have swallowed up a huge portion of the economy already, why stop there?

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