"An industrial economy is enormously complex: it involves calculations of time, of motion, of credit, and long sequences of interlocking contractual exchanges. This complexity is the system's great virtue and the source of its vulnerability. The vulnerability is psycho-epistemological. No human mind and no computer- and no planner- can grasp the complexity in every detail. Even to grasp the principles that rule it, is a major feat of abstraction. This is where the conceptual links of men's integrating capacity break down: most people are unable to grasp the working of their hometown's economy, let along the county's or the world's. Under the influence of today's mind-shrinking, anti-conceptual education, most people tend to see economic problems in terms of immediate concretes: of their paychecks, their landlords, and the corner grocery store. The most disastrous loss- which broke their tie to reality- is the loss of the concept that money stands for existing, but unconsumed gods.
The system's complexity serves, occasionally, as a temporary cover for the operations of some shady characters. You have all heard of some manipulator who does not work, but lives in luxury by obtaining a loan, which he repays by obtaining another loan elsewhere, which he repays by obtaining another loan, etc. You know that his policy can't go on forever, that it catches up with him eventually and he crashes. But what if that manipulator is the government?
The government is not a productive enterprise. It produces nothing. In respect to its legitimate functions- which are the police, the army, the law courts- it performs a service needed by a productive economy. When a government steps beyond these functions, it becomes an economy's destroyer."
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