The error that Hayek spent his life diagnosing and denouncing was what he called “the synoptic delusion,” the belief that humans could gain an overview of the economy adequate to plan it effectively. The means to solve the resultant calculation or coordination problem was the combination of laws and prices. Private property rights here were key. Through what he calls the institutions of meum and teum, mine and yours, combined with the free movement of prices, packets of knowledge would find their way to the most productive users. What he calls the “constitutional ignorance” of humans meant that we could only surrender the task to the market. Given an adequate legal framework, we could let the market effectively think for us.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 173