As any serious student of history knows, centralized planning leads to inefficient logistic and economic systems.  It seems like a smart person or group of people would make better decisions than the creative chaos of the free market…but it’s just not the case.  No one is smart enough to direct an economy and as anyone who’s ever served on a committee knows…committees tend to make worse decisions than any single person could make individually.  My rule of thumb is the bigger the committee the worse the decision…but it takes the world’s longest running Stalinist regime to bring us cannibalism and centralized planning.  How bad can centralized planning screw up a country…

Hungry parents in North Korea have been caught eating their children to avoid starvation.

via Starving North Korean parents ‘eating their children’ | The Sun

I know hunger changes brain chemistry but how hungry do you have to be to become this insane!

The article mentions a long running drought…but what’s really at work is called famine.  Famine is a frequent companion when centralized planning meets farming decisions.  If one farmer makes a bad farming decision…his family goes hungry…if a centralized planner makes a bad farming decision it starves the entire country.  North Korea’s on it’s third generation of bad decisions.