 Many libertarian theories invoke insights from economics. An influential strand of thinking in this tradition, closely related to F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, argues that libertarian or classical liberal political conclusions follow from human epistemic limitations. Free societies, and in particular free market systems, best utilize the available information in society by allowing and incentivizing individuals to act on the partial information they possess, including information about their local circumstances, needs, and desires, as well as their productive abilities and the trade-offs that those might present. Any society that wants to deviate from the decentralized decision-making represented by market exchange, the argument goes, will have to collect, process, and fully understand all this dispersed and complex information, aggregate it into some kind of social welfare function, and assign goods accordingly. This latter process is simply beyond our capabilities. Free societies thus will predictably outperform other societies on important metrics (Hayek 1960, 1973; Von Mises 1949).