user4512082015457514518120519 :
Bro this take is doing a lot of heavy lifting on a strawman. Nobody serious is proposing "one committee guesses iPhone demand for 2032." That's not what modern socialist economics even argues for lol.
A few things:
1. The "no info without prices" thing is wrong on its face, supply chains inside massive corporations (Apple, Amazon, Walmart) are literally centrally planned internally. No market prices between Apple's internal departments deciding how many screens to order. They use forecasting, logistics software, inventory algorithms. If central planning is "impossible," explain how a single company runs a $400B+ supply chain without an internal market.
2. The state built half the tech in your iPhone. GPS, the internet, touchscreen tech, lithium-ion batteries, Siri's speech recognition, semiconductors, all had massive early public funding (DARPA, CERN, government R&D grants). Mariana Mazzucato wrote a whole book on this ("The Entrepreneurial State"). The "free market did it alone" story just isn't true historically.
3. Cobalt mining is a great example against your point, not for it, most of it comes from the DRC under brutal conditions, coordinated by market incentives just fine, and it's a humanitarian disaster. "The market solved it" isn't automatically a win if you ignore who's paying the cost.
4. Nordic countries have huge public sectors and still innovate plenty. Same with mixed economies like Germany, South Korea, Taiwan (TSMC is heavily state-backed). The dichotomy of "pure free market vs one dumb committee" isn't how any real economy works, historically or now.
Hayek's knowledge-dispersal argument is legit and worth taking seriously, but it's an argument against *rigid, price-less central planning*, not against public investment, regulation, or mixed economies, which is what basically every functioning economy on earth actually runs on, including the "free market" ones that made your iPhone possible.
2026-09-02 13:29:09