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The Knowledge Problem

from Protect and Serve EP by Blasted Athwart

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"I’m going to borrow Hayek’s dedication of The Road to Serfdom and dedicate this song to the socialists of all parties. If I come across as haranguing, condescending, or otherwise rude, dear socialists, please forgive me — obnoxiousness is a staple of the genre. Normally I’d teach much more gently." -- Walker

lyrics

How much milk did I drink last week?
You don’t know
How much milk did anyone drink?
You don’t know!

It’s not a question of whether we plan or not
The question is: who does the planning?
A central board pretending to knowledge? (1)
Or each person using what he knows? (2)

Nobody has all the answers
Because nobody even has all the data
The economic problem’s not an equation (3)
It’s how to use knowledge that’s dispersed

Even if we had a government of angels (4)
Even if we were all socialists
We still couldn’t plan the economy consciously
The mind that could comprehend it doesn’t exist!

We want to allocate scarce resources
But how? To whom? When? How do we know?
How do we give the people what they want at the least cost
When the facts we need to know are all subjective? (5)

Science isn’t gonna solve this problem
Local knowledge is even more important
The right boat in the right place at the right time
Can ship your goods cheaper than a fleet of brand new ships (6)

Aggregation won’t substitute for knowledge
The bird’s eye view is much too high
We can’t afford to gloss over the details
But to pack them into one mind would make your head explode! (7)

No one can know all the info
But everyone can know what he needs to know
Prices lead us out of this knowledge problem
By conveying relative scarcities in a self-adjusting signal (8)

Notes
1. Friedrich August von Hayek 2014 [1974]. “The Pretence of Knowledge,” Nobel Media AB.
2. Friedrich August von Hayek [1945]. “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Liberty Fund p. 7.
3. More specifically, it’s not an equation that can be solved numerically. Hayek explains that algebra can be used to illustrate the relationships within the economy. (Hayek 2014 [1974], paragraph 12.)
4. Publius 1788, “Federalist 51.”
5. Methodological subjectivism is a key tenet of the Austrian school of economics. (Michael Clark 2014. Economics 412: Austrian Economics I, Hillsdale College.)
6. Hayek [1945], p. 8.
7. Hayek 2014 [1974], paragraphs 9-11.
8. Hayek [1945], p. 13.

credits

from Protect and Serve EP, released November 24, 2017
Lyrics by Walker Mulley and Walter Peterson, based on the writings of F.A. Hayek
Music by Walker Mulley and Walter Peterson

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Blasted Athwart Hillsdale, Michigan

Inspired by classic punk bands such as The Dead Kennedys and Agent Orange, Blasted Athwart takes quite literally National Review’s motto of “Standing athwart history, yelling ‘STOP!’”

Their music combines aggressive instrumentation with biting sarcasm to rail against those who would oppress the citizenry and exploit the least fortunate. ... more

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