Today is Friedrich A. Hayek's birthday. Born on May 8, 1899, Hayek would be 120 years old. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974, he was, with no doubt, one of the most important voices for individual liberty and free markets in the 20th century.
One of the most essential aspects of Hayek's analysis of the social and market order is the limits on human knowledge that makes presumptuous the idea that one or a handful of men can ever have the knowledge, wisdom and ability to centrally plan or heavily regulate society to better affect than the competitive market system:
“Liberty is essential in order to leave room for the unforeseeable and the unpredictable; we want it because we have learned to expect from it the opportunity of realizing many of our aims. It is because every individual knows so little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.”
"The Constitution of Liberty" (1960)
Even if we had a group of exceptionally wise people running a country, they would need to be replaced at some point. These replacements are unlikely to repeat the miracle of wisdom of the first group of people.
Someone like Bernie Sanders probably has good intentions but lacks the knowledge to understand his own limitations as well as the limitations of those around him.
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