Posted on 12/06/2019 7:40:47 AM PST by karpov
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My socialist sympathies didn’t survive long once I became a journalist. I quickly noticed that the government officials I was covering were not capable of planning the society they hoped to create. It wasn’t because they were bad or stupid. The world is just too complicated.
I came to realize that capitalism is really good at doing the one thing socialism is really bad at: creating a learning process to help people figure stuff out. If you want to run a rental car company, capitalism has a whole bevy of market and price signals and feedback loops that tell you what kind of cars people want to rent, where to put your locations, how many cars to order. It has a competitive profit-driven process to motivate you to learn and innovate, every single day.
Socialist planned economies — the common ownership of the means of production — interfere with price and other market signals in a million ways. They suppress or eliminate profit motives that drive people to learn and improve.
It doesn’t matter how big your computers are, the socialist can never gather all relevant data, can never construct the right feedback loops. The state cannot even see the local, irregular, context-driven factors that can have exponential effects. The state cannot predict people’s desires, which sometimes change on a whim. Capitalism creates a relentless learning system. Socialism doesn’t.
The sorts of knowledge that capitalism produces are often not profound, like how to design the best headphone. But that kind of knowledge does produce enormous wealth. Human living standards were pretty much flat for all of human history until capitalism kicked in. Since then, the number of goods and services available to average people has risen by up to 10,000 percent.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
So David, given these views, if it's a choice between Trump and Sanders, who will you support?
He’ll choose Sanders.
I disagree.
.....It was because they were bad AND stupid. .......................
Brooks “I was once a socialist, now I just vote for and kiss their asses and hope they have me on their tv shows”.
What a SOS this guy is.
Say what!? Who are you and what have you done with David Brooks?
“I, Pencil.” This kills the Socialists.
Whodat?
“Capitalism creates a relentless learning system. Socialism doesn’t.”
Bingo.
Our imperfect system is for that single reason the best, by far, and the one that should be recognized as having the ability to lift society to its highest potential.
He was once a socialist, now he just votes for them.
I’m ignoring the fact that this is David Brooks.
But with that....this is in my journey the Big Point that I got from Hayek that I had not gotten from other anti-socialist thinkers.
It’s an epistemological problem. There’s no way to handle all the info required for civilization....except through a market system with free exchanges/transactions, prices that adjust, transparency in costs.
Where does he stand on health care?
I thought this was perhaps a different David Brooks, but alas it’s not. So this is really nothing but a farce perpetrated by a liar. The only capitalism he may believe in is crony capitalism, just like all other Democrats.
America has massive socialist spending, mainly to buy votes, but we’re pretty good at keeping socialism out of the supply side of the economy.
Well this is certainly going to p*** off his friends of the New York times
You can't square this with the fact that Brooks is the quintessential #NeverTrumper. If Trump has shown he is effective at one thing, it is negotiating his way through free markets, delivering value when the other guy has the opportunity to walk away from the deal, whether it be in real estate or in his various television activities. He is just very good at giving people what they want.
But that is what no one in the Intellectual But Idiot class wants. Their job is to impose decisions on people that are in their own best interests, whether they understand it or not, as determined by graduates of Harvard, or in this case, the University of Chicago, which actually, famously, espouses a free-market philosophy.
““I, Pencil.” This kills the Socialists.”
But some of them are. And some of them are both.
The world is just too complicated.
And in trying to treat Utopia, they instead create hell on Earth.
And now he’s a Commie?
He’s still a socialist at heart.
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