I'm John Batchi with David Henderson, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution

of a professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterrey, California.

David and I are going to move from being targets of this expression of closed down everything,

central planning, to being analysts of a book we read once upon a time when we were students, David reads it all the time.

And a man we venerate. Before Hyac there was Adam Smith and Adam Smith gave us man of system.

Do I say that right professor?

Man of system.

You did.

You did. What is a man of system? He's someone, I won't read the whole quote because it's long, but it's someone who kind of thinks he can arrange people's lives the way you arrange pieces on a chess board.

And here's what Smith said about that.

He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand

impresses upon them.

But that in the great chessboard of human society, man, with he a great writer, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own,

altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.

In other words, we all, we are humans, we are individuals, we are going to respond to the situation

we face and these people trying to plan our lives are thinking, oh, I can just put David Henderson here, I can put John Bachelor there and they're going to do

exactly what we want them to do and that's a that's what out of this was

criticized. And we knew that we We knew that in March of 2020. We'd

been learning it for years. We knew something else. Friedrich Hayek, who was

he and what did he say of a command economy?

Okay, well, let me just by, I'm an emeritus professor now

at the Navy school.

...