One's initial surprise at finding that intelligent people tend to be socialists diminshes when one realises that, of course, intelligent people will tend to overvalue intelligence, and to suppose that we must owe all the advantages and opportunities that our civilisation offers to deliberate design rather than to following traditional rules, and likewise to suppose that we can, by exercising our reason, eliminate any remaining undesired featuers by still more intelligent reflection, and still more apporpriate design and "rational coordination" of our understaking. This leads one to be favourably disposed to the central economic planning and control that lie at the heart of socialism.

Of course intellectuals will demand explanations for everything they are expected to do, and will be reluctant to accept practices just because they happen to govern the communities into which they they happen to have been born; and this will lead them infor conflict with, or at least to a low opinion of, those who quietly accept the prevailing rules of conduct.

Moreover, they also understandably will want to align themselves with science and reason, and with the extraordinary progress made by the physical science during th past several centuries, and since they have been taught that constructivism and scientism are what science and the use of reason are all about, they find it hard to believe that tere can exist any useful knowledge that did not originate in deliberate experimentation, or to accept the validitiy of any tradition apart from their own tradition of reason.

...

These reactions are all understandable, but they have consequences. The consequences are particularly dangerous -- to reason as well as to morality -- when preference not so much for the real products of reason as for this conventional tradition of reason leads intellectuials to ignore the theoretical limits of reason, to disregard a world of historical and scientific information ...

-- F. A. Hayek, "The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism", p 53-54.

I am reminded, again, that liberal/left/progressive/socialist persons accept the idea of biological evolution without a central planner or designer, and yet seem predisposed to believe that there must be a planner or designer for a complex economy of 310 million (or 6 billion, or more).