I have just two sentences left.
The lines were very long and the food was disgusting. Why? Prices were set by the state with no understanding of marginal costs because of the conceit—that's Nobel laureate von Hayek's word—of politicians and bureaucrats who thought they knew more about the optimal prices of the millions of food items than the decentralized market of price discovery.
No, we in the public sector do not.
My final comment is that no brain in the world, not even those of President Xi and his millions of minions, can process the trillions of bits of information daily in an economy concerning prices and scarcity at the margin.
Members of Parliament, Pogo warned us, “We have met the enemy and he is us”, not the grocery retailers.
Thank you.