The old saying is, failing to plan is planning to fail.
Ben Franklin is the first modern author that I know of who wrote on the subject of planning. I realize that the Mormons have capitalized on olde Ben and taken the subject of personal planning to an almost religious level with their Franklin Planners. Maybe in a few hundred years people will be reading about how Hiram Smith dug the Franklin Planner up in his backyard in suburban Salt Lake City--ptl.
I don't believe that everything can be planned for or that everything should be planned for; not to say that you can't, but, then you introduce a certain rigidity into a system that anything out of the ordinary will cause it to break. Direct or indirect democratic control of major institutions allows for the most flexibility; and also allows for the planners of those institutions to be the most responsive to the people--because they are responsible to the people.
Another real problem is all of this emphsis on meritocracy rather than democracy. I'm not sure that smart people necessarily make the best planners. If we keep up on the trail we are on now it will take a graduate degree to get a job that a high school graduate could do.
Something else that people forget is that no matter what the economic system, people are still going to be doing business. Exchanges will happen.
Carrol is overly pessimistic. The New Deal in this country was almost bloodless.
Tom Lehman
Doug Henwood wrote:
> Charles Brown wrote:
>
> >Marxists don't disagree with Bobbie Burns that the best laid plans
> >of mice and men often go astray. But a dialectical approach teaches
> >that in any problem parts must be understood in relation to the
> >whole, thus the concept of the whole or the total is a critical
> >aspect any problem solving including human social economy. The
> >critique of perfect knowledge does not refute this, because this
> >dimension is already cognized in the Marxist dialectic of relative
> >and absolute truth with respect to nature and society.
>
> In other words, your kind of Marxism does claim a kind of perfect knowledge.
>
> On this issue, I don't think it's very fruitful to talk at a high
> level of abstraction. I think you've - not you, Charles, but anyone -
> got to talk about the body or bodies doing the planning, the space of
> such planning (nation? region? locality?), the degree of precision
> (x% of social resources devoted to health, or the precise mix of
> band-aids and MRI machines), etc.
>
> Doug