T. Boone Pickens … Central Planner?

A slice of wisdom from Don Boudreaux, writing the WSJ in response to T. Boone Pickens whose convertion to voodoo economics seems complete:

Crusading for a national "energy plan" and upset that Holman Jenkins isn’t on board, T. Boone Pickens asks rhetorically: "My father used to tell me that a fool with a plan is better than a genius with no plan. So I ask, what’s Mr. Jenkins’s plan?" (Letters, Sept. 2).

Contrary to Mr. Pickens’s assumption, an economy is not simply a gigantic business firm.  An economy is both incomprehensibly more complex than is even the largest multinational corporation, and it has no specific, overriding purpose comparable to a firm’s goal of maximizing profits – a purpose by which the performance of each employee and each investment decision is relatively easy to evaluate.  So while plans and some measure of central direction make sense for firms, these are poison to economic growth.  They prevent the on-going decentralized experimentation from which spring not only progress that is unplanned, but progress whose details could not have been foreseen before they actually materialize.

The Soviet Union famously had plans for its economy; the United States did not.  Which country was the fool?

This whole idea of successful businessmen like Pickens, Mitt Romney or Warren Buffet earning the right to "run" an economy because they could run a business is dangerous and false. It would be akin to arguing that because the lion is the "King of the Jungle," he should regulate the activities of the rest of the ecosystem.
-Max Borders