Synthesis of Austrian and Distributist Economics via Information Science

From Timothy B. Lee's September Cato Unbound essay on Hayek:

Hayek’s point is not that the price system is superior to other decentralized social institutions. Rather, he’s pointing out that all successful large-scale cooperative efforts involve standardization, which necessarily means discarding some potentially relevant knowledge in the process of codifying other knowledge deemed more important. The important question is not whether to standardize in this way, it’s deciding how, and how much to standardize. Too little standardization means missing out on opportunities for economies of scale and the division of labor. Too much standardization means discarding information that consumers actually care about, leading to the infamous rubber tomatoes of standardized agriculture. And the wrong kind of standardization—discarding important information while preserving trivial information—is doomed regardless of the degree of standardization.

What makes decentralized economic institutions powerful isn’t standardization but the possibility for competition among alternative standardization schemes. Rubber tomatoes create an entrepreneurial opportunity for firms to establish a more exacting tomato standard and deliver tastier tomatoes to their customers. In real markets, you see competition not only among individual firms but among groups of firms using alternative standards. Markets gradually converge on the standards that are best at transmitting relevant information and discarding irrelevant information. In contrast, when standards are set by the state, or by private firms who have been granted de facto standard-setting authority by government regulations, there is no opportunity for this kind of decentralized experimentation. Then the market is likely to be permanently stunted by the use of a standard that does a poor job of transmitting the information consumers care about most. (emphasis mine)

Economics is not the study of money as is commonly presumed, nor is it the study of markets as even many advanced students of economics believe; economics is really the study of information and decision making.  It's worth reading Lee's essay in full to see how the same Hayekian process shaped the Internet protocols we currently use.  (Lee is currently a candidate for Ph.D. in computer science at Princeton.)  Read Dispatches from the Wild Wild East to see how Hayek's theories have shaped my views on education.

I find Lee's views on Hayek as ultimately supporting the view of economics as an information science to be compelling.  And since theorists of all stripes seem to agree at least that we're in a "mature" capitalism with too much standardization, I wonder if this Austrian informational positive cannot be tempered with a distributist normative.  I have yet to read John C. Medaille's book "Toward a Truly Free Market", which I hear is more or less the definitive guide to distributist economics.  This is from a review by Gerald Rusello for The American Conservative:

Writers like Timothy Carney have shown in detail how, contrary to accepted nostrums, big government and big business go together, and indeed that business prefers bigger government to keep out competition and increase their access to subsidies and other benefits.  Neither supports real economic growth or the protection of liberty.

Similarly, Médaille argues that capitalism and big government must go together. Without government intervention, capitalism is unstable.  Since 1953, Medaille argues, the economy has been in recession approximately 15% of the time, as opposed to almost 40% in the preceding century. The dividing line, he argues, is the imposition of consistent Keynesian policies to balance aggregate supply and demands. Greater amounts of government intervention were needed to stabilize the economy over the last five decades. As current events may be bearing out, this situation is untenable. Some other solution is needed.

I understand Lee's criticisms of overstandardization to be the same untenable situation as described by Medaille.  For the purposes of this untenable situation, it may be useful for the Austrians and the distributists to engage in a meeting of the minds; that is, to counterintuitively make a push for "standardization".  There is a tendency amongst libertarians and anarchists especially to wait until an idea is perfected before pushing it on the masses, when really they should be asking themselves if it's superior to the status quo.  

A bit more self-confidence on the part of libertarians/anachists (and I think we're seeing the seeds of this in the blogosphere) coupled with bottom-up development solutions designed to empower and amplify the ability of local knowledge to solve local problems, like microfinance and Fab Labs (the latter especially vis-a-vis Medaille's criticism that mainstream economic models discount the value of production for use), could mean a bright future for economics and a bright future for humanity, so long as individual information collectors stay out of the way and let the system's imperfect components create a spontaneously ordered world at least superior to the status quo.