the central planners become obsolete, anachronistic

Posted on: January 18, 2020 at 12:17:16 CT

To celebrate this is not really a matter of ideology. If the market had not been working spectacularly well despite attempts by government to hobble it and channel its energies, we would certainly find ourselves much poorer today than we were fifty years ago. And yet here we are, a country with a population that has fully doubled in size in that period and a GDP that has increased by a multiple of twenty-eight. This much we can say: by historical standards, this is a miracle, and the market, not the government, is responsible.

In the meantime, the market has outrun the state to such an extent that the whole planning apparatus of the postwar period, always based on a kind of pseudo-science, has become preposterously untenable.

This is especially true given the size and expanse of the global economy. In 1953, the dollar value of world merchandise trade between all countries totaled $84 billion, not a small sum but about one-fourth the size of the total US GDP in the same year. Today, the dollar value of world merchandise trade is $7.3 trillion, or nearly two-thirds the size of the total US GDP. This increasing integration of the world economy, which was given a huge boost by the collapse of Soviet satellites and the opening of China, has shattered the dreams of anyone who hoped national economic planning had a future.