The fantasy of a utopia managed by the best and brightest minds is a lingering curse of the 20th Century. Far too many people believe a government of geniuses could engineer a better society and economy as if they were upgrading a computer system.
There are many reasons this fantasy crashes and burns upon contact with reality, beginning with the impossibility of finding some completely selfless, dispassionate, and incorruptible legion of brilliant minds that could manage everything without becoming a special interest.
Then there is the inconvenient truth that the widely distributed COOPERATIVE and COMPETITIVE genius of a vast country filled with free people always outperforms central planners. It's not even a close contest, and it never will be.
The latest version of the utopian delusion is that information technology could at last allow the central planners to know as much about the distribution of resources and the needs of society as the people, and process the information as rapidly as their distributed intelligence.
That will never be the case, no matter how fast the computers get or how pervasive information gathering becomes. Millions of free people acting on their own observations and self-interest will always dramatically outperform central planners in a huge and diverse nation.
One fallacy of the techo-utopian delusion is assuming the nation could be run like a highly successful corporation or a military operation. This is a tremendous category error. The United States is larger and more diverse, by orders of magnitude, than any corporate endeavor.
The American people, competing and cooperating voluntarily, spread across countless districts of a vast nation, will always spot opportunities and act upon them faster than central planners, even if the planners were vastly more efficient than they always turn out to be.
Central planners are also far more susceptible to every failure of decision-making than individuals are. Sunk costs fallacy, forcing new data to fit inside old strategies, forgetting about supply and demand... you name it, the central planners are more likely to do it.
This is because central planners don't have skin in the game or money on the line. They might think of themselves as smart, but they are also numb. They lack the fine-tuned nervous system of free people acting in their own interests.
The other problem with the techno-utopian fantasy is that it always undersells the degree of authoritarian control needed to implement its designs. The people are led to believe they will be governed by geniuses offering wise guidance, not controlled by force.
There is no way to reconcile "enligthened authoritarianism" with the morality of representative government. We forget that at our peril. /end
