Usually I get tired first, my last shot on this one for now. I don't think we need more planning period, that is not a panacea. We need more planning in certain areas. I agree with Doug at least two of the three areas that he mentions: health care and utilities, I'd take thyese entirely off the market.
Housing strikes me as a more complex issue. Planning can be great, I;ves een worker's housing projects, e.g., in the Netherlands, that are marvelous. On the other hand you can get The Projects, like infamous and soon-to-be-demolished-and-gentrified Cabrini Green here in Chicago. Or those endless dreary blocks of Krushchev flats that scar the Russian urban landscape.
I think the problem with housing may not be too little planning, but not enough money for individuals to buy the kind of housing they needd or want on the real estate market, plus the unspoken relentlness support for suburbanization in the form of subsidized roads, water and sewers, etc. (A form of planning, actually.) Plus the problem with out draedful segregated public school system. But I am not an expert on real estate, far from it.
Anyway, I think we will be a lot more likely to get support for good planning if we don't denounce all markets as evil and box ourselves into defending rather than learning from the Soviet experience. We need real answers to Hayek problems to get good planning to work right too.
If there's something that is closer to a left demand, I think it is not Down With Markets! Up With Plans! Rather it is however we say today: Socialize the Means of Production! Expand public and democratic control over the economy! More abstractly, democracy and equality are ends, planning and markrts only tools. Them we mix, match and adjust to get more democarcy and equality.
What do you think?
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> >If we agree on that, "we are all market
> socialists."
>
> I'll say it once more and then resign from this
> debate. The
> politically relevant question in the here & now is
> how we can get
> more planning and less market. It's the only way
> we'll ever get the
> poorest decently fed and housed, how we'll get all
> of us health
> insurance, and how we'll get beyond a
> petroleum-based energy system.
> Real-world markets in housing, health care, and
> energy are failing
> very badly.
>
> Doug
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