No one ever has all the facts.

Knowledge about resources, needs, and possibilities is dispersed across individuals. It exists in fragments, often without anyone fully aware of its importance until context or circumstances change. Much of what is useful or valuable only becomes visible after people act, not before.

In 1968, F.A. Hayek explained that competition is necessary because this condition of dispersed, incomplete knowledge cannot be corrected by planning or prediction. Centralized decision-making fails not because planners are incompetent, but because the facts they would need to plan successfully are not available in advance.

Competition creates a decentralized process where individuals, pursuing their own aims, test ideas against reality. Prices, decisions, and adjustments reveal information that could not have been assembled beforehand.

Success is not guaranteed. Errors are inevitable. But competition allows corrections to happen quickly, before errors become systemic failures.

Where goals are clearly defined and the information is stable, design is effective. Where the facts are unknown or shifting, discovery through competition is the only practical method. Attempts to replace discovery with control do not eliminate mistakes; they make mistakes harder to detect and correct. Over time, systems that suppress discovery lose the ability to adapt and survive. Progress depends on processes that uncover information no one could have foreseen. Competition is not one option among many for achieving this. It is the only one we know.

No one plans a city's food scene in advance.
No central authority says, “We will have three Italian restaurants, two taco stands, a vegan bakery, and four coffee shops.” 

Instead, people open what they think might work. Some succeed, some fail. A few places catch on because people like them. Others close because they miss the mark. Over time, the mix of food in a city reflects what people actually want, what fits the neighborhood, what ingredients are available, what cultures have blended (and thousands of small adjustments no one could have predicted or coordinated ahead of time). If you had tried to "design" it all at the start, you would almost certainly get it wrong…like Orlando, FL.