While in Pennsylvania recently with some dinner companions, I was asked quite frankly why I was a conservative, with the explanation that I was nothing like the conservatives this person had imagined. What he was really saying is that I was too smart, too tolerant--too "liberal" to possibly be a conservative.

It wasn't the first time someone asked me the question, and the answer is always the same--like most people, I started out liberal, and got progressively more conservative as I observed reality. I've always been interested in economics and business, and some time by my middle twenties, I was completely disillusioned with liberal economics, which weren't economics at all in my mind, but politics.

The New Deal was an economic failure, but a political success, and that my friends is what the Obama program is really all about.

But the whole idea of fixing, running, regulating, designing, or modeling an economy rests on the notion that, if the right smart guys are at the rheostats, the economy can be ordered by intelligent design. But the economy is no mechanism. There is no mission control. Government cannot swoop down like a deus ex machina to explain the inexplicable and fix the unfixable. Why? Because the knowledge required to grasp each of the billions of actions, transactions and interconnections would fry the neural circuitry of a thousand Ben Bernankes. This is what F. A. Hayek called the knowledge problem. Knowledge, Hayek reminded us, is not concentrated among a few central authorities but is dispersed around society. That's why bad unintended consequences follow government interventions like black swans.

A few economists have not succumbed to the "fix it" fixation. They know that society is not like a machine at all, but an ecosystem. Faster than you can say market fundamentalism, a Keynesian will scoff at this metaphor. But his favorite trope has helped to stagnate many an economy; making Rube Goldberg apparatuses out of means-ends networks, perversion out of productivity. As Czech President Vaclav Klaus wisely notes: "The market is indivisible; it cannot be an instrument at the hands of central planners."

The country will eventually emerge from the dark night it is about to enter, of that I have no real doubt. Nevertheless, I am both saddened and angered at all the lives about to be destroyed by ignorance, arrogance and criminal self-interest.