More on The Problem

These arguments are a vulgarization of the ideas of Friedrich Hayek, especially as those ideas are developed by Thomas Sowell in Knowledge and Decisions. (The need to economize on goodness, at best implicit in Hayek's "Use of Knowledge in Society," is made explicit in Sowell's book.) Modern and classical liberals agree with my statement of the Problem, but some radical leftists have not: they think scarcity is not a problem, that there would be plenty of stuff to go around if some people didn't hog all of it. Hmm that's contradictory.

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