The Cost of Society

Sometimes so much ridiculous stuff goes on during the week in politics that writing about it is beyond me. Current events are sometimes so blatantly ensconced upon a faulty premise that I'm confused as to why anybody would argue about it in the first place. I ask myself, "are we really considering this policy," or "do people actually understand what that legislation would do in the long run?"

Short of feeling dejected, I wrote what follows over the summer. In it is what I believe to be the case for the free market, that the required knowledge to even govern (by compulsion) effectively approaches infinity on a long enough time line:

Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution points out that, “The transformation of Western economies from agriculture to industry brought with it a reduction in the proportion of the population consisting of autonomous economic decision makers. However much “consumer sovereignty” was retained, as producers their role as fixed claimants to some extent insulated them from the direct consequences of their own decisions, largely by limiting the scope of their decision making itself.”[1]

Indeed, perhaps the only fathomable drawback to the division of labor and its advancement lies in its virtue, i.e., that we as producers become ever more specialized as time passes. Consequently, we are farther removed from the producing of all of our needs; yet, politically, we retain much ability to shape the overall economic landscape of the country. Inevitably, a disconnection between knowledge and decision-making manifests itself, and as the division of labor progresses, knowledge becomes exponentially expensive. This is not an argument for or against a particular political philosophy, but on the contrary, the cost of knowledge is likely to be the culprit when pondering the utter disparity in today’s state of affairs and yesterday’s reality.

There is always the price system that enables anybody to realize the state of affairs, whether he chooses to or not. However, this is only as far as a market economy is concerned and even this realization incurs the cost of knowledge; it seems as though contemporary leaders default on such transactions, and are extolled for it to no end.

[1] Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (Basic Books, Inc., 1980), p.164