However, politicians and economic planners, when trying to direct the economy from a hegemonic center of power, face an insurmountable challenge: they do not possess the dispersed and inarticulable information that individuals manage in their daily decisions. Friedrich Hayek called this “the knowledge problem,” and Feynman, with his brilliant analogy, takes it to the extreme: if electrons were as unpredictable as humans, physics would be absolute chaos.

In economics, that “chaos” is precisely what socialist planners (of all parties) face. They attempt to impose a rigid structure on a system that, by nature, is fluid and spontaneous. Escohotado diagnosed it masterfully: “Centralized socialist planning is like decreeing a massive cerebral infarction.”

Does all this mean that a pure free economy is the only stable system? Here

Rothbard weighs in, answering:

Praxeologically, yes; psychologically, the issue is in doubt. The unhampered market is free of self-created economic problems; it furnishes the greatest abundance consistent with man’s command over nature at any given time. But those who yearn for power over their fellows, or who wish to plunder others, as well as those who fail to comprehend the praxeological stability of the free market, may well push the society back on the hegemonic road.

And Rothbard continues:

Such are the laws that praxeology presents to the human race. They are a binary set of consequences: the workings of the market principle and of the hegemonic principle. The former breeds harmony, freedom, prosperity, and order; the latter produces conflict, coercion, poverty, and chaos. Such are the consequences between which mankind must choose. In effect, it must choose between the “society of contract” and the “society of status.” At this point, the praxeologist as such retires from the scene; the citizen—the ethicist—must now choose according to the set of values or ethical principles he holds dear.