Dear Editor:

Regarding your editorial today urging the Board of Supervisors to abridge property rights I cannot improve upon my letter printed in today’s Wall Street Journal: 

·         WALL STREET JOURNAL
LETTERS

• APRIL 13, 2011   Rumsfeld, Hayek and Epistemology

F.A. Hayek in his "The Constitution of Liberty" cites the Harvard Business Review 1958: "Consider for a moment that any one person can only know a fraction of what is going on around him. Much of what that person believes will be false rather than true . . . At any given time, vastly more is not known than is known . . . It seems possible, then, in organizing into a hierarchy of authority for the purpose of increasing efficiency, we may really be institutionalizing ignorance." Hayek seems clearer, with less gobbledygook on page 29, "the case for individual freedom rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievement of our ends and welfare depends. . . . Liberty is essential in order to leave room for the unforeseeable and unpredictable; we want it because we have learned to expect from it the opportunity of realizing many of our aims. It is because every individual knows so little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it."

Fred Schnaubelt , San Diego

         

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