The famine in Europe, the facts and suggested remedies, being a report of the International Economic conference called by the Fight the Famine Council ... 5th and 6th of Nov., 1919, by Lord Parmoor

Why? It is not that the Superstate will return one to the campfire, but that the fantasy of the Superstate seems more elegant than the simple arithmetic of the Free Market. The Free Market is not a fantasy. We see its efficiency when the power goes out, when we are stranded in an airport, when we throng to the new exciting business down the blockБЂ”the desire to exchange goods and services in order to increase individual happiness also increases group and societal happiness. The curtailment of that freedom leads to shortages, famine, and oppression. But its operation, and the demonstrability of its superiority to top-down control, cannot be embraced without forgoing the fantasy of the Return to Nature and the Campfire. Friedrich Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, called the view of the Free Market the Tragic View: that man is limited; that government is limited in its power to, justly, do more than take care of the infrastructure and adjudicate between conflicting claims according to a mutually agreed upon set of laws; that any may and many do misuse both the goodwill of their fellows and the laws themselves to gain immoral advantage; that elected officials are only human, and must be responsible first for their own election, with all that entails; that once elected they will look first to their reelection, which is to say to their own self-interest; that with residual time and energy and wisdom, they may address the social problems before them, but that even in so doing they are, being human, limited in wisdom and foresight ...»