The social product which is now maintaining a human population of this world four or five hundred times as large as that which man could achieve in t… - Friedrich Hayek

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The social product which is now maintaining a human population of this world four or five hundred times as large as that which man could achieve in the natural hunting and gathering stage is owed only to the division of labor, skills, and knowledge. This division could never have been designed or planned, but it arose through and is now maintained by the guiding service of competitive market prices and wages that tell each person where its efforts can make the largest contribution to the total. These self-generating signals, which inform the individuals about the combined efforts of thousands of events of which they can have no direct information, bring about an adaptation of the individual efforts to the unknown. No central direction could achieve this adaptation because the knowledge of all the facts of which the market takes account is spread among thousands and cannot be known to any central authority. It is, of course, impossible to improve signals when one does not know what determines them. Wealth, which social justice would like to distribute as a reward for merit and need, is, therefore, due to the circumstance that the direction of individual efforts is guided by a choice between returns which depends largely on accidental circumstances of time and place and is effected but not conclusively determined by what the individual can know or do. Thus, the wealth which the advocates of social justice want to redistribute would not exist if social justice reigned. Social justice is a fraud, a promise to distribute what one would not have if one followed its bidding. Wealth just would not be there or would rapidly disappear if the ordering by the principles of the market that now guide its production were replaced by some others which would give to each that to which he imagines himself to be entitled.