Comments for Predictions are difficult... at http://www.adamsmith.org , comment 1 to 2 out of 2 comments http://www.adamsmith.org Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:50:33 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/economics/predictions-are-difficult...-200805181412/#comment-260 Oh no, it is not the models that are wrong, it is our reading of their results that most often goes wrong. You see most of the times the models work splendidly, considering that usually their whole purpose is to predict what the modeller wants to see predicted. - Per Kurowski Wed, 21 May 2008 17:36:10 +0100 http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/economics/predictions-are-difficult...-200805181412/#comment-247 I think you are making a fundamental and disastrous mistake here. Your assertion that a practical socialist-planning supercomputer might one day be possible is an extraordinary arbitrary leap of logic, but that is not the mistake I have in mind. Saying that socialist planning is a moral ideal but is just temporarily impractical due to a lack of technology is all that is necessary to sustain collectivism. Many people would rather be moral than practical, and will quite happily institute socialism before we have your government supercomputer, if you concede that they are morally right to want to override the desires and decisions of the individual. Socialist planning is indeed a practical disaster not because of a lack of technology but because it is fundamentally at odds with human nature and the foundations of morality. As Ayn Rand famously and repeatedly observed, if you want to defend freedom and capitalism, you must defend its moral base, egoism, and work to persuade people that socialism is not just impractical, but immoral too. I expand on this at much greater length in the below post at my blog. http://www.medworth.org.uk/?p=294 Kind regards, Andrew - Andrew Medworth Tue, 20 May 2008 12:31:23 +0100