"too many advocates of government intervention fancy themselves to possess some special god-like wisdom"

From Cafe Hayek.

"from page 563 of the late Karl Brunner’s 1970 Kyklos article, “Knowledge, Values and the Choice of Economic Organization“ (original emphasis; footnote deleted):

The sacrifice of cognition is particularly easy to detect in objections to the market system induced by discrepancies between one’s desires (usually glorified as social values) and the result of market processes.  One dislikes the results of the market process.  One also is convinced that one knows what the world needs and finds the allocations emerging on the market not satisfactorily tending to these favored needs.  Ergo, the market has failed and should be replaced by an administrative arrangement.  One is always convinced that this arrangement operates in the manner desired by ones’s wishes.  The obvious naiveté of this critique does not preclude its frequency and appeal to many articulators.

Among the valuable insights in this passage from Brunner is the recognition that not only do too many advocates of government intervention fancy themselves to possess some special god-like wisdom, but they also believe in miracles."

"This famous Sidney Harris cartoon (below) captures what is wrong – what is deeply unscientific – about far-too-much modern economics.  The miracle assumed by the unscientific ‘scientific’ modern economist is that government will act (1) apolitically, (2) without any of the human imperfections, myopia, and psychological quirks that (are assumed to) give rise to the market imperfections that allegedly justify government intervention, and (3) with more information and wisdom than is discovered and used in markets.
All the fabulous ballistics (a term that I understand was used by the late Jack Hirshleifer) that lead up to the miracle and that describe matters following the miracle might well be the flawless products of unquestionable brilliance.  But it is simply, deeply, and inexcusably unscientific for economists (or any one, for that matter) to merely assume that government will perform as the social-engineering theory requires it to perform.  Put differently, despite more than a half-century of scholarship in public-choice economics, too many economists mysteriously regard warnings about government failing to act ‘perfectly’ as being unworthy or, at least, only of secondary or tertiary significance.  It’s unscientific – deeply so."