Intellectuals incapable to learning that their plans will never work

The lede on The New York Times story at the top right of today's front page reads:

“WASHINGTON — President Obama signaled on Friday that he was close to choosing a director for a new consumer bureau, but an array of top jobs that will be crucial to shaping economic policy and financial regulation for the rest of his term remain unfilled.”

It beacons to mind something Jerry Z. Muller of Catholic University of America says in his lecture series on capitalism. Depression era economists like John Maynard Keynes, he says, were enthralled by the Soviet Union’s series of five-year plans, which at the end of each they would falsely trumpet to the world their success, also without deigning to mention the millions starved and slaughtered.

Muller noted that self-styled intellectuals simply could not grasp the concept that their planning and manipulation of the intricate economy and money supply could not anticipate and account for all possible outcomes. Laissez faire, free market economies with their occasional dips and declines were simply not tolerable. The brightest minds could not believe they were failing, thus it had to be the fault of the system.

Free people acting in concert with each other for their mutual benefits was beyond their imagination. It was too chaotic. They had to be controlled and channeled by their betters.

One of those Muller quotes extensively is Austrian economist F.A. Hayek, right, a critic of Keynes who wrote in "The Road to Serfdom" in 1944:

“To build a better world, we must have the courage to make a new start. We must clear away the obstacles with which human folly has recently encumbered our path and release the creative energy of individuals; We must create conditions favorable to progress rather than ‘planning progress.’ It is not those who cry for more ‘planning’ who show the necessary courage, nor those who preach a ‘New Order,’ which is no more than a continuation of the tendencies of the past 40 years; and who can think of nothing better than to imitate Hitler. It is, indeed, those who cry loudest for a planned economy who are most completely under the sway of the ideas which have created this war and most of the evils from which we suffer. The guiding principle in any attempt to create a world of free men must be this: A policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy.”