… is from page 168 of Robert Higgs’s excellent 2012 book, Delusions of Power:
The planners more or less presumed the existence of private-sector problems and took for granted that they could successfully solve those problems through the use of government’s coercive power and the taxpayers’ money. They did not give much weight – indeed, they often gave no weight whatsoever – to the possibility of what later came to be known in public-choice theory as “government failure.” Thus, seeing apparent market failures that left the economy in an inefficient configuration, they supposed that they could identify exactly what to tax, subsidize, or regulate and exactly how much to do so in order to move the economy into an efficient configuration.
DBx: Although Bob is here writing specifically about LBJ’s Great Societyers, his description of their mistaken presumptions and outlandish hubris applies to any and all economic planners, including to those who today would use state coercive power to ‘deal with’ climate change or to impose industrial policies.
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