Economics, as the so-called “dismal science,” often has to put a damper on the imagined ideas of what people think is possible, especially political elites. In The Fatal Conceit, Hayek famously articulated,

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account. (emphasis added)

In this quote, Hayek deals with the simultaneous overestimation and failure of imagination. On the one hand, elites and those who support them, constantly overestimate “what they imagine they can design” were they in charge. On the other hand, such minds can only “conceive of order as the product of deliberate management”; they cannot imagine how order and prosperity could possibly come from decentralization and free and peaceful social cooperation.

Imagination and abstraction are key tools for economics. Since we necessarily exist in a changing world of present and historical variables, in which humans choose and act, we have to use sound logic, praxeology, and thinking in terms of counterfactuals in order to develop economic laws. Mises writes,

In order to trace back the phenomena of the market to the universal category of preferring a to b, the elementary theory of value and prices is bound to use some imaginary constructions. The use of imaginary constructions to which nothing corresponds in reality is an indispensable tool of thinking. No other method would have contributed anything to the interpretation of reality. But one of the most important problems of science is to avoid the fallacies which ill-considered employment of such constructions can entail. (emphasis added)

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, history, or unable to imagine free-market solutions—outcomes of entrepreneurial action, international division of labor, a developed capital structure, how goods have been provided and problems solved historically, or how goods would or might be provided (or problems might be solved) on the free market in the future. Indeed, it is no crime to be ignorant of most things since knowledge is vast, dispersed, specialized, particular. Often lack of knowledge allows us to specialize and exchange with one another and benefit from dispersed knowledge throughout society. That said, it is totally irresponsible to allow ignorance, not understanding how something would be possible, or failure to imagine in order to leap to the alleged necessity of state monopoly provision.