What Donald Trump Doesn't Know About Military Planners

By Robert Wenzel

President-elect Donald Trump is in love with military planners. He said recently during a FOX interview that he likes Generals. He has already named/nominated three to key positions in his incoming Administration to former Generals.

Gary North has a different view about military planners:

The main problem with military planners is they are central planners. They think through their plans from the top down. They assume that they can coordinate the intricate complexity of life. They face this inescapable problem: “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Definition: No matter how carefully a project is planned, something may still go wrong with it. Then, once they have dragged the nation into war, they must finance it. They must plan to run a war from a top-down military command, but they must tax the market to pay for the war. As Hayek showed in his 1945 essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” no central planning committee has sufficient knowledge to plan the entire economy. Only individuals in a free market possess this kind of detailed local knowledge. The price system provides individual decision-makers with the information they need to allocate resources rationally, i.e., in terms of customer demand. In short, central planners are blind. They are also arrogant. They think they have the ability to coordinate all aspects of production. Military central planners are the blindest central planners of all. They have guns. They shoot people who resist on both sides of the battle lines. Yet they can barely figure out how to coordinate a single battle plan.

This means that Gary North knows a lot more about Generals than does Donald Trump.

This article was originally published at EconomicPolicyJournal.com