Hayek’s great lesson is that each of us, individually, can know only an infinitesimally small amount of the knowledge the full use of which is required for any great and prosperous civilization to exist – but that, when we engage with each other under the laws of private property, contract, and tort (what Hayek called “the rules of just conduct”), each of us is led by this engagement to combine his or her speck of knowledge with the specks of knowledge of countless others in a way that causes this use of these dispersed bits of knowledge to produce and sustain a great and prosperous civilization.
Hayek’s great counsel is that we never forget how individually ignorant each of us inevitably is, or how unfathomably great is the amount of knowledge daily put to productive use in free, market-oriented societies.
-Don Boudreaux, from this post
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