What works better, individual strategy, where each person charts their own course in adapting to the environment or big picture planning, where the central organization tries to create a larger system to control the environmental? The EconLog addresses the issue (hat tip, InstaPundit) by asking the question:

Go through a mental list of major government programs, and ask how many of them you would enact today in their current formats. Social Security? Even if you like the concept, if you had it to do over again you would make it less susceptible to demographic imbalances. Medicare? Agriculture policy? Energy policy? f you step back and look at it, the problem of fragile by design that I wrote about concerning Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is widespread in top-down solutions. And yet, like Charlie Brown getting ready to kick a football, we seem to have an infinite capacity to believe that it will be different this time. We think that the next top-down design introduced by government will work fine, it will never degrade, and we won't find ourselves ten or twenty years down the road wondering how such a mess was created.

As in the case of Freddie and Fannie, central planning creates organizations that become to important to fail, even when they do fail, and we all pay the price. The best course for government would be to bail them out the last time, then break them up into a dozens of competing firms that are small enough to fail. Some will fail, but since they would then be responsible for their own survival, they good would survive and thrive.