The 'idle' class is not actually 'idle', and if they are then usually their parents were not 'idle'.
> The invisible hand...this is Adam Smith being misquoted. Adam Smith did use the metaphor of an invisible hand - Smith said the invisible hand was something that blocked free trade, not facilitated it. L. Read is using the metaphor in the exact opposite manner in which it was proposed.
I don't know what you are talking about
'Every individual... neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it... he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.' - Adam Smith
> Also, much of this could be said about a pencil being made in the USSR. Did any one person in the Soviet Union know how to make an entire pencil, from tree to graphite and such? Perhaps some government bureaucrat looked at his charts and ordered it to be made, but how different is that than the corporate bureaucrat looking at his charts and ordering pencils to be made?
That is true, but the point of the story is not to say that markets are the only way to make something. The point of the story is to show the complexity of a simple object, in order to illustrate how complicate the overall system is. The implication is that you need markets because of the extrem difficulty of getting at this information.
The USSR could do it, all things consider, they could not do it well. They did actually use lots of markets, property rights and intensives to achieve this, just worst version of it. Central planning as envisioned by Trosky, Lenin, Bukharin, Bauer and co is so impossible that it is impossible to enforce, people will automatically start working around the inefficacy of the system.
> Also, in our era of TARP bank bailouts, quantitative easing, farm subsidies and such, this notion of say the US government not having a central role in the economy as it exists is absurd. This medium we read and type on now was created through military contracts to Fairchild Semiconductor, DARPA grants for ARPAnet research and such, over many decades.
A central role and a central plan is not the same thing. Planning is about direction, and you can say lots about the US government but they don't point the economy in a particular direction, usually they try to stop the economy from changing.
Point out that government has invested in successful stuff is not really relevant. The US was the most successful and innovative economic power on the planet when the federal government had less then 2% of GDP. Nobody denies that lots of industry developed faster because because of government, but many other developed slower as well. Where does this leave you?