Obviously, the details of planning an entire nation's economy cannot be determined by one or a few individuals, but require an army of specialists. A specialist is by definition trained to view the world from a limited perspective. In general, therefore, even the best-intentioned specialist tends to attach exaggerated value to particular endeavors associated with his or her specialty. In a free market, such tendencies are held in check by market costs, which limit the quantities of resources that a specialist can expend on his or her favored projects. When the specialist is assigned the task of planning the allocation of "public" resources in a socialist economy, however, he or she tends to allocate excessive resources to those special projects. Elaborating this point, Hayek notes that in a sense "we are all specialists" with a tendency to "think that our personal order of values is not merely personal but that in a free discussion among rational people we would convince the others that ours is the right one." For this reason, people tend to assume that their personal goals would be realized in a rationally planned socialist system. In reality, however, such a system merely "bring[s] out the concealed conflict between their aims" (
).
Furthermore, we have so far assumed that the specialists are at least well-intentioned. But planners do not always have the most humanitarian intentions. In the absence of a free press and popular control of the government, the most powerful planners can allocate large quantities of costly goods to their personal consumption with virtual impunity. For this reason, total socialism naturally tends toward extreme inequalities of wealth, clearly opposite to the intentions of most of its advocates. 
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