>>> <JKSCHW at aol.com> 05/05/00 03:36PM >>>
In a message dated Fri, 5 May 2000 1:42:11 PM Eastern Daylight Time, "Charles Brown" <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> writes:
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I said: The key to the success of markets is the conscious involvement of people who have an incentive find out information and act on it.
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CB: At the point that they find out the information and before they act, they are planning.
Right--that kind of planning is OK. Hayek calls it entrepreneurship.
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CB: We already have entrepreneurship. It isn't working. All the individual "plans" come into conflict with each other. We need something new.
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I said: The problem with planning is that it attempts to aggregate all that informatuion in one place in a group of people who have np special incentive to get it right or to do anything in particular with it.
CB: The notion that at some level the whole need not be planned, loses the rational kernel of holism in Hegelianism.
What's rational about that?
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CB: If each part is planned without any consciousness of all the other parts and their plans, the plans of each part regularly and frequently come into conflict with the other parts and their plans. So, planning all the parts is rational.
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> However, not all or every last detail of planning need (or should) be done "in one place in one group of people." The plan of the whole can and must be based on and integration of planning of the parts.
What makes it planning, then--why is it an imprivement over markets if individual production units make their own decisions independently of each other, just like in a market economy?
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CB: They don't make their own decisions absolutely independently of each other. It might be conceived of as several phases. Each part makes a preliminary plan based on their specifics. Then all parts' plans go to the planning of the whole group. Then the partial plans are adjusted based on feedback from their relationship to all the other plans.
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> The fact that the Soviet efforts became over centralized, does not mean that we cannot learn from the trials and errors of that concrete experience , and make appropriate adjustments in the relationship of the whole and the parts of the (now) worldwide economic system.
Right, and the lesson that the Soviets learned was that they needed markets. Unfortunately Gorby was under the false impression that they would just grow naturally, so he took apart the central planning system without anything to put in its place.
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CB: The lesson the Soviets learned is without a supporting revolution in an advanced capitalist country, the capitalist nations united could force the lone socialist nation to put so much into defense ( and recovery from the biggest war of all times) that , the lone socialist nation could not spend on raising living standards enough to keep enthusiasm for acutal socialism in the population.
If the markets have to be instituted in a planned way, they seem more like planning than markets.
The evidence from during and after the end of the SU does not support the claim that the Soviet Union needed markets.
> Communism is to be a world, species wide, system.
So, we could not plan a smaller unit, so we will try to plan a larger one?
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CB: Markets haven't worked in smaller (countries) or larger units (globally), so on that basis we wouldn't try markets or market socialism either.
"Markets" are capitalism. Capitalism isn't working.
CB