Don't do something, just stand there

We’re told that economic management institutions need to be updated, polished, brought into the modern world:

“Our disappointments around economic growth are not because we’ve just run out of ideas like neo-liberalism or socialism, but it is because the economy has changed,” Haskel said. “Trends towards intangible assets like software need new institutions. This includes competition policy, cities policy and regulation. If we don’t change, then the intangible economy is going to stall, which will become the source of our difficulties.”

We’re entirely fine with real world institutions changing but this is rather our point here. It’s who changes them and how that matters. Take, for example, the wise guidance of the Rolls Royce minds of the civil service over something as simple as whether a baby may be allowed to enter the country or not:

Olga Kolisnyk applied five weeks ago to take her two children – Illia, 11, and baby, Maria – to the UK from their home in war-torn Kharkiv but the process has been tied up in red tape.

Kolisnyk, a university professor, was initially told by UK officials that her infant daughter would be allowed to travel as she had been added to her mother’s Ukrainian passport.

But two days later she was informed by visa officials in Sheffield that this would no longer be acceptable – and that Maria would have to undergo biometric scans 800 miles away in Warsaw before they would be able to fly to Britain.

These are not the people we desire planning anything to do with an actual economy now, are they? But guess who will be doing the planning if politics or government are allowed to have anything to do with the economy?

Sir John Cowperthwaite refused to allow anyone to compose GDP figures for Hong Kong, on the grounds that some damn fool would only try to do something with them. The place got richer, faster, than anywhere else on the planet up to that date.

State planning, just say no, not even once. For it possible to look at what state planning actually does and then consider the merits of it, you know, by their actions ye shall know them?