And it happens that some of the goods provided by the government are
worth having.
No one has a clue regarding "worth" if the government interferes. The
government destroys/distorts the /price system/, which is the only
possible way to gain a hint of a given population's "values." Even
Lange new that. (And "a given population" is a fiction anyway.)
So it is really missing the point, for example, to say: People value
education, therefore education should be provided by government. So
should socks and bread, I guess. We don't know if roads are
underproduced/overproduced, where, when, how, quality, etc.... That
is because the government has so grossly distorted pricing in
transportation markets. "We" don't know that about education, or
anything else, because guvmint has it tentacles in every recess of our
lives.
"The calculation argument reveals the
spontaneous market order to be a discovery procedure by which
knowledge
of more efficient production processes is generated. That such
knowledge
cannot be entirely dispensed with explains the total collapse of every
economy where central planning was completely substituted for the
price
system. But piecemeal government interference into the price system
must,
on this ground, be seen as similarly obstructive of this same,
necessary
discovery procedure, and therefore as distortive of the knowledge
which it
generates. Thus, the calculation argument may be used to explain many
of
the less-than-total failures resulting from government tinkering with
the
price system, in fundamentally the same way that it explains-as shown
in
these essays-the utter economic ruin inevitably resulting from
attempted
abolition of the price system."
http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/5_1/5_1_1.pdf
