CB: We already have entrepreneurship. It isn't working. All the individual "plans" come into conflict with each other. We need something new.
JKS. I agree that the kind of entrepreneurship we have doesn't work as well as we wouold like for most people. But that is not because we need to get rid of entrepreneurship. We need to get rid iof capitalism, and in particular private ownership of productive assets. Entrepreneurship should be carried out by worker cooperatives.
As for the plans of entrepreneuers coming into conflict, you have no alternative. Your solution to the problem that the planning board has to know too much is to decentralize it, so that individual production units make their own plans. These will come into conflict with each other just as much. To this you say:
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.
JKS. But this reinstates the problem that the CPB has to know everything. It also slows down the process to molasses pace.
Besides, in the market, entrepreneurs don't make their plans in the dark. They inform themselves about what others are doing that might affect their own plans and adjust their behavior accordingly. If they guess wrong or conditions change, the market corrects them.
JKS. I had said: the lesson that the Soviets learned was that they needed markets.
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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.
JKS. That was part of it, but not all.
CB. The evidence from during and after the end of the SU does not support the claim that the Soviet Union needed markets.
The evidence during is quite strong that that was what the USSR needed; every reformer came to that conclusion, and the more marketized Eastern states, notably Hungary and Yugoslavia, outperfomed the USSR economically by a large margin. The evidence of after also supports the need for markers: they do not have markets now; Russia is a kleptocracy without a mode of production that lives on eating the wealth created under the old system.
CB. If the markets have to be instituted in a planned way, they seem more like planning than markets.
JKS. I am happy to have that sort of planning--that is, markets instituted in a planned way.
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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.
JKS. Markets have created tremendous wealth and innovation. Capitalism does a poor job distributing the wealth fairlt.
CB: "Markets" are capitalism. Capitalism isn't working.
JKS. This is scientifically incorrect. Capitallism is private property, wage labor, and generalized commodity production, or markets. MS takes the markets and dispenses with private propety and wage labor. Is it capitslism? Ask the capitalists whose property would be tuerned over to the workers. That capitalism isn't working, you will hear no argument from me.
--jks