It is not as if planning never takes place under capitalism. Planning is pervasive in capitalism at all levels. It seems sometimes as if anti-planners are defending an economic model where all that agents ever do is respond to "market signals", with no more intelligence or insight into their situation than an amoeba. I find this dubious.
Nor is it as if planning was ever very centralised under alternative economic structures. Nothing I've ever read about planning in the USSR suggests that the centre even tried to micromanage the economy in the way Hayek and Mises seem to think they did. Such ideas appear to have little bearing on Mao's China or Castro's Cuba, and still less on Stafford Beer's plan for Chile or Sandinista economic policy.
Mises and Hayek advanced, successfully as far as I can tell, a conception of prices as a way of communicating information about productivity and efficiency to various agents so that they can act accordingly without needing detailed information about the entire economy. Albert's Parecon and C&C's ideas about socialism - as well as all forms of "market socialism" - seem to start with a flat admission that this analysis is accurate. I can't see how Hayek and Mises point about the nature of markets has any bearing on the defense of capitalism. They certainly don't seem to me to have made the case that the current means of distributing information to agents and the heuristics they use to act on that information is the best _possible_ way to manage economic activity.
Planning happens, and the real issues ought to be who is doing the planning and what heuristics they use when they plan. Or have I been reading the wrong people? I don't have anything that can qualify as a formal education in economics, so I really do want to know if I am missing something.
Scott Martens