>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."
Why this caricature? To talk about more planning we don't need to get to Gosplan-ish 100% coverage. Even Gosplan didn't plan everything - there was a lot of improvisation. The point is we can plan a lot more than we do now, and a lot of the old objections just don't hold water in today's data processing world.
Doug