Gabriela Calderon

Un blog para discutir eventos politicos y economicos desde un punto de vista liberal. A blog for the discussion of political and economic events from a classical liberal point of view.

Sunday, February 27, 2005

Planned Europe Vs. Spontaneous America

While the U.S. pursues—as U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick said—“competitive liberalization" via multilateral, bilateral, and regional trade negotiations; Europe pursues an inflexible and one-way track: positive integration. This is not to say that either one of them has shed all their protectionist fears, neither have actually. What it does convey, however, is that couldn’t it be possible that the different legal structures of organisms such as NAFTA and the EU are leading these to better or worse times?

Most scholars agree that integration, be it economic, political, cultural, and social, can never be bad. However, it is in the type of and in the manner of conforming integration that they all differ greatly. Where Hayek would have a NAFTA-like integration, in which the emphasis is placed on the spontaneous development of politico-socio-economic-ties through the allowance of the free interaction among individuals; Habermas would have us carefully plan and prevent any possible undesired outcome.

Once again, men tend to commit “the fatal conceit” of believing themselves to be omniscient and able to possess in one mind all the information available to correctly plan and prevent. To fully prove that these plans and preventions are necessary we would need to input all the information available in the universe which cannot even begin to be conceived by our minute minds. Hence, we would fare much better relying in the individual’s privileged “knowledge of the fleeting moment.”

Is there evidence today that points to the perverse consequences of the European’s fatal conceit? Or, is there evidence that it does not have such consequences? On the other hand, can it be said that the negative type of integration carried out by the NAFTA model is being successful?

5 Comments:

Blogger GA said...

Brief comment, though a longer more detailed one is in order.

There seems to be a fallacy in mainstream economic thought: there is an opposition between the imperfect knowledge of science and its failures (in planed economics for instance) and the "spontaneous, natural" organization of markets and its optimality.

The fallacy lies not only blind faith in the optimality of spontaneous market organization or in the belief that the ignorance that makes planing problematic is insurmountable, but also in the supposition that both are in an inrreconciliable opposition, that the purity of markets disallows any sort of planning as if planning is not a "natural" but an artificial product of society.

Planning, regulation, etc, is just as natural and sponatneous as markets. It seems artificial because its born of politics, culture, a field that ussually escapes the scope of economics.

Economics is a beautiful, succesfull science, but its scope is focused on economic phenomena, hopefully its methodology will transfer to less succesfull (apparently crappy) sicences like sociology and etc and we will not have such blind spots

Put Haloscan! I want to comment more.

7:27 PM  
Blogger Roberto Iza Valdés said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

9:24 PM  
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