(By the way, Lindsey is really missing the boat in asserting that the key problem with central planning is corruption. Corruption is frequently a problem with central planning, no doubt, but the key problem is that central planners lack the capacity to solve the problems that they are charged with resolving. This is Hayek’s insight. Having the price of wheat appointed by a government official would be a bad idea even if St. Augustine were available to fill that position.)

However, in Lindsey’s defense, I would argue that one reason that IT advances have not caused firms to fragment is that the IT advances really don’t affect the ratio of transaction costs to hierarchy costs in the short run. If my boss wants to put up cameras in the break room, he can do that tomorrow. Creating markets for intermediate products and services takes much, much longer, maybe decades.

Chris Bertram—like me, starting from a basic view of the cosmic all skeptical of and somewhat hostile to Brink Lindsey’s—reads Lindsey’s Against the Dead Hand and—like me—finds at an extremely impressive book: Junius …Well, I’ve had some critical…

"I think you’re wrong," said one of the barons of the center-left Washington, DC thinktanks. "Cato’s biggest problem isn’t that its day-to-day stuff is too carefully crafted to be politically useful to those factions of the Republican P…

Some threads of the ongoing discussion about the Efficient Markets Hypothesis have begun to address the contrast between markets and planning, with the state as the prospective planner. As is often the case in such discussions, the implicit contrast is…