“In the real world, the complexity here gets pretty hairy pretty quickly: There’s a lot more to health care than picking any 12 of 50 options out of a hat and ranking them. There are hundreds or thousands of factors that go intorelatively simple things such as infertility therapy, and of course many of our pressing health-care concerns—cancer, HIV, obesity—far exceed the limits of our medical knowledge, entangling us in questions related to genetics, human behavior, environmental factors, and dozens of intractable realms of inquiry that are both far afield from our specific medical concerns and yet critical to actually understanding them. This is no No. 2 pencil, and not even an iPhone—this is complexity in one of its fullest human expressions.”

“Mises argued that under central planning, economic calculation never actually happened because it became de facto impossible—information is dispersed throughout the marketplace, central planners have no way of gathering information about people’s real preferences, and in any event the sheer volume of data necessary to the task meant that calculation never happened. Rational economic planning, he concluded, was impossible, because the planners could never process sufficient information to make rational calculations. Whatever their plans were based on, he argued, we could be sure that the central planners were not “considering all the options” and “taking into account all of the information.”

Excerpt From: Kevin D. Williamson. “The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome.” HarperCollins, 2013-05-01. iBooks.

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