Newsweek?s Anna Quindlen tries to use John McCain?s digital deficit to bolster her case this week that the GOP candidate is ?Out Of It.? The nice thing about Quindlen?s column is that she unwittingly offers more evidence in the case against big government.
[Out Of It] describes too many of our leaders, in business and industry as well as politics. It means that manufacturing executives don’t get ahead of the curve of consumer desires, that government-agency heads are often blind to how their policies really work for ordinary people, and that political figures can be insensible to undercurrents because they are always sailing over the mainstream.
What Quindlen ignores ? or doesn?t understand ? is that a manufacturing executive who ignores consumer desires doesn?t remain a manufacturing executive for long ? unless the government props up the industry. Absent government interference, consumers will drive the manufacturing executive or his competitors in the right direction.
On the other hand, government and political leaders who are ?blind? or ?insensible? never encounter market cues that would convince them to change their ways. And Internet savvy cannot make up for that deficit. No one person can ever have all the information he needs to make decisions as good as the decisions consumers make while acting in their own interest.
As Ludwig von Mises wrote in Human Action:
[P]eople tend to forget that the director is always a human being, not an abstract notion or a mythical collective entity. We may admit that the director or the board of directors are people of superior ability, wise and full of good intentions. But it would be nothing short of idiocy to assume that they are omniscient and infallible.
