I recently received through the mail, as did most households in Bermuda, a slick document entitled ?Charting our Course? from the Sustainable Development Project which has an optimistic objective of putting together a plan for Bermuda?s long-term future.

In my blue-eyed innocence, I had expected a document that would make some sensible and modest suggestions with regard to Bermuda?s environment ? reduce traffic here, save a reef there, increase the number of turtles, create some open space and so on.

To my great surprise, this project is something bigger and greater than simply a sustainable development project. It has morphed into the beginning of some great economic plan that will solve all problems from the prison population to affordable housing to trash management to traffic congestion to creating jobs to solving crime ? the list is endless ? it could probably cure acne on teenagers.

This is an all singing, all dancing, plan that makes the modest ambitions of saving the environment look like a piker. By manipulating language (and he who defines terms wins the debate before it begins), the Project Team has produced not so much a sustainable development plan, but a blueprint for economic planning ? notwithstanding the fact that every national economic plan has been a disaster whenever it has been tried, witness the implosion of Russia and elsewhere. Their document is riddled with vapid meaningless clich?s and mumbo-jumbo such as:

Holistic decisions;

Uptake of technology;

Core values;

Inclusive in offering high quality employment;

Encouragement of broad participation.

By a series of cooperative actions, Bermudians will be led into a realm of economic bliss where everyone will get what he needs, the environment will be protected from the ravages of economic growth, and enlightened government will take care of our every need and every irritation no matter how minor. Social engineering advocates like the Sustainable

Development Project Team are brimming over with all sorts of plans to make the world better, more moral, richer, safer, more rational, or whatever. They are convinced their pie in the eye schemes will work, if only they are given authority over everyone else to make lives better.

Alas, the chances of the promised Utopia arriving in Bermuda are nil, just as paradise failed to show up in many other planned societies. In a complex economy like Bermuda, it is impossible for central planners, or a group like Bermuda?s Sustainable Development Project team, to possess or acquire the requisite knowledge to coordinate all the economic activity of society.

In a society where high job specialisation exists, each member of that society possesses only a minute fraction of all the knowledge needed to operate an advanced economy. Society and its institutions are the product of the shared and contributed knowledge and wisdom of many more people than any social engineer could ever hope to understand and comprehend.

Economic planning rests on the erroneous assumption that the best and most efficient economy and social order is a product of purposeful and deliberate design by a committee of wise men appointed by the government, rather than the result of spontaneous development by human beings peacefully working together. The social engineer believes that wise men have the knowledge, the insights, the detailed information needed to combine with the power of the state to create an improved social order. History tells us otherwise ? just ask the Russians or the Poles.

To the well-meaning planner, ordinary people have the intelligence and habits of rats and rabbits, and cannot be trusted act rationally unless guided by those in authority. They honestly believe that individuals left to their own devices are too stupid and too ill-informed to make correct decisions, and that major decisions about life should be made by those in power e.g. those like themselves. Leaving things to ordinary people means, in their eyes, that no one is in control of events and because they are more virtuous than most, that control should be exercised by them.

They cannot comprehend that the spontaneous order of society is far superior than the minute regulation that occurs when political process takes over.

To limit society?s development to what the social planners can master and handle is to straight-jacket all social improvement and create an environment of social and economic stagnation. This is what happened in the USSR and what led to its collapse and the degradation of its environment. This is not what most people have in mind for Bermuda. Now I am sure the leader of Bermuda?s team, Ross Andrews, is an intelligent and capable man, but I am equally sure he is not of sufficient intelligence to grasp more than minute fraction of all the knowledge that exists within Bermuda. I will make a bet with him and, if I lose, I will donate $10,000 to a charity of his choice.

The bet is that if he selected 100 of the most intelligent people in Bermuda and asked them without any outside help to perform a simple task like making from scratch a can of ginger beer at a cost of under $1 they would be unable to do so. The knowledge and skills required to do that are dispersed over many thousands, probably many millions, and our 100 great and good would not be up to the job simply because they could not master the necessary skills. When one thinks of the many thousands of products that are available in a modern supermarket (around 30,000) it becomes evident that our super duper project team could not plan their way out of a paper bag.

Another way of looking at the impossibility of achieving their stated purpose is to think what a Project Team set up in 1905 ? a hundred years ago ? would have sought to do in order to create a sustainable development environment in Bermuda. They would have made valiant efforts to preserve the farming industry, the fishing industry, and keep Bermuda as a naval base for the Royal Navy. Tourism would have been regarded as a menace to our 1905 future; and international business could not have been imagined.

Such a team may never have conceived of the ideas of a modern telephone system, television, aircraft crossing the Atlantic in six hours, the modern computer, and a whole raft of modern inventions. It is simply not possible to plan the dynamics of tomorrow?s economy on the basis of how people acted yesterday, or act today. Locking in future generations on the basis of present knowledge is not just arrogant, it is foolhardy. It is the pretence of knowledge.

I do not wish to be entirely negative. Frankly, I would favour economic planning if I had an encyclopaedic knowledge of what is going on at present, and an uncanny ability to foretell everything that is going to happen in the future ? say the next 50 years. But, if I was privy to this wealth of detail about the present and the future, would I be prepared to waste my time labouring in government for a measly hundred grand, when I could be making a fortune for myself with all that valuable information and knowledge? Nobody is that generous.

The idea of one person, or a small group of intellectual giants, having this exhaustive knowledge of the present and the uncanny ability to predict the future in detail is so preposterous than it hardly seems worth bothering about ? except to the extent the many people delude themselves into believing that they are omnipotent.

For economic planning to have an even chance of succeeding, it would be necessary for historical progress come to an end as of today; and for everything that can possibly be known to be already known by those in authority. It is predicated on a stable (or static) future with no surprises, and an all-embracing knowledge of the present. Historical progress has, as it were, come to an end ? everything that can be known is already known.

Spontaneous order recognises that changes are constantly being made by individuals in ways too numerous to forecast ? the invention of email, or the end of the typewriter; and that human knowledge is severely limited ? no person can make a pencil or even grow his own food.

The wise man knows that he is ignorant of most of the factors that motivate men, that the present is so complicated and subjective and is really not knowable to a small group; and the future is dependent on factors that we have only a hazy notion of and cannot be predicted. It is stating the obvious but no one has the gift of being able to predict the future.

Furthermore, the project team simply does not have the resources or the ability to maintain surveillance or even an understanding of the immense amounts of data and other information that is created daily (even hourly) by the millions of participants in a free market economy.

No planner or group of people however talented and capable could possibly collect, collate and synthesise the information that is spread among the millions and millions of people that participate in the modern international economy (of which Bermuda is a small part), let alone make sense of it.

To try and plan such activities such as producing food, clothing, motor vehicles, information technology, banking, oil, medical services and the million and one other goods and services produced in the free market economy is economic stupidity of the highest order. It would condemn our economy to stagnation, and forego the freedom and vibrancy that occurs when people are left alone to determine their economic fate. Bermuda would be akin to Eastern Germany, not Western Germany, North Korea not South Korea, China not Hong Kong. Chaos not order would reign and there would be stagnation not economic growth ? poverty not prosperity.

We can make four reasonable assumptions about the Sustainable Development Project:

1. It is likely to be wrong ? dead wrong ? in its major assumptions;

2. Its errors will do the maximum damage because they will be imposed on everyone;

3. They will be persisted in long after the errors have been revealed, because government is the slowest of all creature to admit mistakes ? think Departments of Tourism and Education; and

4. There will be recommendations to increase the size of the civil service and give high paying jobs to the Project Team in order to implement their plans.

Almost one thousand years ago in England a subtle lesson in the limits of public authority was offered by King Canute (995-1035) who, when implored by fawning courtiers to demonstrate his regal powers by commanding the ocean waves to halt their assault of the shores, waded into the surf, held up his hand in mock gesture, and permitted all to observe his royal drenching. Canute could not avoid the force of nature and keep back the tide.

Today, we have a government committee that seriously believes it is omniscient and that it can keep back the tide. Conceit may infect our politicians but we should immunise ourselves against such folly in much the way King Canute did a thousand years ago.

I look forward to seeing the Project Committee, along with the Premier, on Elbow Beach.