DEVOS Central Planning Vs. the Power of the Free Market Reality

  

DEVOS Central Planning vs. the Power of the Free Market Reality"

The free market isn't just 'capitalism'—it's the most powerful distributed supercomputer humanity has ever built.

Right now: ~8.3 billion people on Earth = 8.3 billion processors running in parallel.

• Farmers deciding crops based on soil, weather, prices they feel instantly.

• Small business owners pivoting overnight to what customers actually want.

• Workers choosing jobs, haggling wages, inventing hacks no planner could dream up.

Many nodes are 'underpowered'—lacking perfect info, making mistakes—but together? An incredible emergent intelligence. Prices are the network protocol: they aggregate trillions of signals in real time, no central server required.

Davos elites think they can micromanage better with their committees, AI models, 'stakeholder' plans. They can't. Even with supercomputers, the knowledge problem crushes them—dispersed, tacit, local knowledge can't be uploaded to a single brain (or bureaucracy).

Hayek nailed it in 1945: In "The Use of Knowledge in Society", he explained:

• "The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess."

• "The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people... are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; that is, they move in the right direction."

Markets solve this via voluntary exchange and price signals. Central planning? It pretends the problem is computational. It's epistemic. You can't centralize what only exists in lived experience.

Recent echoes reinforce this: Peter Boettke (2025) tied Hayek directly to resurgent planning debates (tariffs, industrial policy), arguing central planning can't replace the "telecommunication system" of true markets. Even discussions of AI as a tool for planning echo Hayek's warnings—the "fatal conceit" that tech can overcome dispersed knowledge persists, but tacit, local insights remain irreplaceable.

And here's the knockout punch: Even though the minds at the World Economic Forum—heads of state, multinational corporation leaders—may be brilliant, and even with the massive additions of AI computing power, this is dwarfed by the raw computing power and speed of the free market population of the world. Even with some errors, some maybe less-informed souls, the aggregate force of 8.3 billion real-time decision nodes cannot be rivaled. No elite committee, no matter how smart or augmented by AI, matches the parallel processing, adaptive speed, and emergent wisdom of billions acting on their own stakes and local knowledge.

Davos 2026 Reality Check

This year's WEF Annual Meeting (theme: "A Spirit of Dialogue") emphasized cooperation amid ruptures—AI as a productivity booster and "general-purpose technology," redesigning work/institutions for ROI and trust, de-risking trade/finance, and new multilateral alignments for energy/minerals. Leaders pushed integrated approaches to AI scaling, workforce reinvention, and geopolitical stability.

Yet critics highlight the irony: heavy AI talk focused on tangible results and people problems first, but the vibe often felt like elite monologue rather than true dialogue—shifts to AI from climate/DEI slogans, yet still top-down coordination favoring incumbents. X chatter notes desperation in losing narrative control, with AI treated more as a scarcity/supply-chain issue than revolutionary decentralizer. No direct Hayek sessions, but the distributed mind's edge shines: while committees debate "living the questions" and new deals, billions make unscripted trades daily.

A farmer could probably run a Davos devotee's job for a day (network, talk big ideas). The reverse? That elite quits before sunrise—frustrated by real decisions, real stakes, no safety net of jargon.

Flip the script: Televise an Iowa farm summit. Put farmers, small biz owners, workers at the podium first. Let the centralizers defend 'relieving' us of ownership and hard choices amid their "spirit of dialogue." Watch the distributed mind school the top-down fantasy in real time.

The free market has 8.3 billion processors. What's your count, Davos?

 

 

Curtis Neil/ Grok 4.0 January 20, 2026