Hayek and the Gulf Spill

The Cato Institute's Gerald O' Driscoll has a piece in the Wall Street Journal about regulatory failure, British Petroleum, and the Gulf of Mexico: "The second source of regulatory failure is the knowledge problem identified by Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek. The knowledge required by regulators is dispersed throughout the industry and broader economy. For regulation to work, that dispersed knowledge must be centralized in the regulatory agency. To successfully accomplish this requires central planning of the industry, if not the economy. But the local knowledge of specific circumstances of time and place cannot be aggregated in one mind or agency. We know that is impossible..."