Mr. Hayek and a plate of chips

Hayek’s grand insight in his Nobel lecture was that the centre just never can gain enough data to create the information on how to run society in any great detail. This does, of course, still leave open the meaning of “great” and “detail”. At some level of granularity we are going to have to have centralised decision making whatever the fog of ignorance such decisions are taken in. Say, and just to pick an historical instance which will never repeat itself, what should be the British response to the French marching upon Brussels again?

But that level of detail does seem to be pretty low (or high perhaps). Here’s The Guardian on food:

The grave effects of this relatively recent departure from time-honoured eating habits comes as no surprise to those of us who never swallowed government “healthy eating” advice in the first place, largely on evolutionary grounds.

Is mother nature a psychopath? Why would she design foods to shorten the lifespan of the human race?

And time is vindicating. This bankrupt postwar nutrition paradigm is being knocked for six, time and again, by up-to-date, high quality research evidence that reasserts how healthy traditional ingredients and eating habits are.

Apparently organic rice doesn’t lead to immortality.

We do not, by the way, insist that either this or the official advice is correct or not so. Instead we just want to ponder the idea that the official advice might be wrong. Even after all those decades upon decades of research and investigation. If this is true then we’ve a guide to what level of detail we ought to have government dealing with, don’t we? If they can’t manage simple things like advice upon diet then the complex issues like the housing market, who makes what where, in what quantity, prices, energy supply, all those sorts of things, will have to be dealt with by the alternative, markets.

Government will thus be restricted to areas where they are competent like dealing with bumptious Corsicans. Well, mildly competent perhaps, don’t forget it took them 15 years last time around.