Now, put all the information you are talking about for 300 million people -- just to keep it to the US -- and feed it into computers at a government bureaucracy to make decisions about what toothpaste Susan Jones will need in Oklahoma City in December 2007 . . . . This really does call to mine the joke about "I'm from the government and I am here to help you."
The thing is, WalMart has a special interest in keeping tabs on all this information in an accurate way. If they do it better than their competitors, their investors make money and the management gets bonuses. If they screw up, they go the way of K-Mart. What plays the role of that incentive in your non-market alternative? Apart from the question of sheer information overload.
And Doug is right that market socialists don't care for capitalism. That is why we are socialists. That shouldn't be hard to remember.
jks
--- Dwayne Monroe <idoru345 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Justin:
>
>
> there's just no way of getting, collating,
> tabulating, and processing
> accurate information about all the products that
> people consume and the
> stuff that goes into making them.
>
> ===========
>
>
> This sounds less than correct to me.
>
>
> Yesterday, I went to a food and stuff market. I
> purchased toothpaste,
> multivitamins and ten pomegranates. The toothpaste
> and multivitamins,
> enclosed within cardboard containers, were scanned
> by a laser reader to
> obtain data from the universal product codes printed
> on their boxes.
>
> The fruit were tagged with numerical stickers which
> the checkout person
> entered into the keyboard of her cash register.
>
> The UPC codes and ID number of the fruit - entered
> at the time of
> purchase into a database - enabled the market to
> know what I purchased,
> how many of each item I purchased, the date I
> purchased it and other
> important bits of information.
>
> I'm confident this data is available to command and
> control elements
> that can determine, with great accuracy, how many
> containers of Colgate
> Total (and what variation of the product) were sold
> at their 22nd street
> store on December 30th 2004.
>
> This is one method that retailers use to determine
> re-ordering, shelf
> position, what should be put 'on sale' and so on.
>
> Wal Mart has created an extremely robust version of
> this product
> tracking system that also takes into account the
> supplier's
> manufacturing components, costs, profit margins,
> etc.
>
> Isn't this exactly the sort of data stream you claim
> we cannot achieve
> and exploit for planning purposes?
>
>
>
>
> .d.
>
>
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