Central planning doesn't work: going against economic truisms, the city of Detroit is trying to control the local business environment and "give" prosperity to a select portion of its citizens.(ECONOMICS)(plans to build AfricaTown, the blacks-only business district)

Free-market economist F. A. Hayek, in his book The Fatal Conceit, makes the basic argument for capitalism and free markets, and against the "fatal conceit" of socialism's central planners.

"To understand our civilization, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously," Hayek writes; "it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread the means of an evolutionary selection--the comparative increase of population and wealth--of those groups that happened to follow them."

Said another way, the unruliness and mayhem of West Germany's spontaneous economic order outperformed the centrally designed and less changeable economy of East Germany. Or as Hayek put it, "Order generated without design can far outstrip plans men consciously contrive."

The problem with giving a central authority the power to direct the operation of an economy, explained Hayek, is that the economic order is "so extended as to transcend the comprehension and possible guidance of any single mind," or any single committee.

In contrast, capitalism works because "the extended order arises out of a competitive process in which success decides, not the approval of a great mind, a committee, or a God, or conformity with some understood principle of individual merit." The basic economic process in capitalism, "natural, spontaneous, and self-ordering," runs itself by automatically collecting, organizing, and acting upon "a greater number of particular facts than any one mind can perceive or even conceive."

The validity of Hayek's analysis, on a global scale, has been demonstrated by the economic collapse of an endless string of centrally planned "utopias"--from Cuba to the economic failures of Eastern Europe, from Tanzania to Nicaragua.

In each case, the "fatal conceit" was that central planning could create something more efficient than the self-ordering process of a free economy, something more orderly, more equal--and a system where intellectuals and government planners would have a greater hand in calling the shots in order to keep things shipshape.