Strange Nuclear Coincidence

It is not often we talk about dark things on this blog like an unprovoked nuclear attack.

But one of the strangest coincidences just occurred during the past 24 hours.

First, we have an article from Bill Bonner, who happens to be one of my favorite writers, on the topic of "Why Central Planning Fails".

When you boil it down, large-scale central planners fail because they believe three things that aren’t true.

First, that they know current conditions (wants, desires, hopes, capabilities, resources). In other words, that they know the exact and entire present state of the community they are planning for.

Second, that they know where the community ought to go; that is, that they know what the future ought to be.

Third, that they are capable of creating the future they want.

None of those things is more than an illusion. Together, they constitute what F. A. Hayek called “the fatal conceit that man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes.”

Not to overstate our case, however, it is also true that humans can design and achieve a certain kind of future. If the planners at the Pentagon, for example, decided that a nuclear war would be a good thing, they could bring it about. The effects would be huge. And hugely effective.

But this extreme example reveals the only kind of alternative future that the planners are capable of delivering, by pulverizing the delicate fabric of evolved civilized life.

Then, 12 hours or so later we see a statement from North Korea, that bastion of central planning and communism when things at the UN do not go their way.

North Korea makes Nuclear Threat

North Korea threatened to launch a preemptive nuclear strike on its “aggressors,” including the U.S., ahead of a United Nations vote on tougher sanctions against the totalitarian state for last month’s atomic test.

North Korea “ will exercise the right to a preemptive nuclear attack to destroy the strongholds of the aggressors and to defend the supreme interests of the country,” according to a Foreign Ministry statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency. It warned the UN “not to make another big blunder.”

 So it seems that perhaps central planning North Korean style could indeed create the future they want us to have.  But will we want that kind of future!