One Man Alone or Follow the Flock

Many an astute thinker has noticed that fourteen men in a room will come up with fourteen different solutions to any given problem and none will agree with another. Forgetting for a moment that fourteen men in a room will more likely come up with three solutions, four or five "big-men" and a couple of factions, lets assume for a minute they are right.

 Lets think that as K says in Men in Black that a person is smart but people are stupid and that one man is usually a better descision maker than a community. There is anthropological support for this idea, as even in  early egalitarian societies a "big-man" often was the final arbiter of all actions.

We also know that one man cannot possibly comprehend all that happens in a society or an economy, particularly in our modern age. The intricacies of human interaction defy the social sciences and laugh in the face of central planning, leaving mankind to wallow in his hubris and folly. One person cannot plan it all, and still less can a bureaucracy (The bureaucrat is always for sale, and never knows the full extent of his actions.)

Eliminateing the democracy, the autocratracy, and the bureauacracy for their ineffectiveness, we are left with the Smithian conclusion that every individual is most fit to run his or her own affairs, and perhaps have a say in the affairs of those closest to him (by voluntary choice such as friends and the family unit.)

If each individual is to run his or her own affairs in an economy that we do not wish to be stagnant, it would seem to me that stored capital, private property, and the profit motive are all necessisties.

Denying property would lead to stagnation and would deny Man's nature as a manipulative being that survives by hand and mind. Denying the accumulation of capital would impead progress and cause consumption to dominate production, which benefits industrial economies in the short term, but the whole of Mankind cannot survive as consumers only. To deny the profit motive would be to tell the individual that he has no buisness caring for himself and that someone else is better suited to it.

We must allow the individual to progress, in turn allowing society to progress. As a strictly utilitarian arguement, I cannot see any one man is fit to run society nor any society fit to run one man.