[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

Top down management of the entire society and economy could not function if the numbers reported up the food chain were lies. The Poles said, "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."

Liberals simply cannot comprehend this, and that markets distribute information as well as goods.

[nathanbedford]

You are right and to continue your thought, the market also distributes risk and responsibility in return for distributing capital. In other words, capitalists both acquire and furnish information by their actions but they must ever be mindful that when they act on that information they will be responsible for the loss or enjoy the gain.

So it is the responsibility of a free market to act on information to select those ventures which will succeed and to deprive those ventures which will fail from wasting precious resources. When the government intervenes into the marketplace it does so with a whole different set of motives. The government is not concerned with whether a business succeeds from a profit point of view but whether it generates positive political feedback or generates campaign contributions or even graft.

So government distorts the marketplace, distorts the information coming out of the marketplace, distorts the incentives for going into the marketplace, and ultimately creates a whole new marketplace in which the entrepreneur comes to understand that success comes not from risk and reward in a fair and free market but from crony relationships with the government.

Once that process gains momentum it is very difficult to reform because both capital and political power coalesce against loan entrepreneurs and voters deprived of information

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