>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.
Housing is another area where markets always fail. But of course there is good planning and bad planning and of course planning in the context of a market economy is incredibly problematic.
Residential housing is universally subsidised in this country. Probably in the US too, although I am not familiar with the mechanisms there. In Aust. the housing provided through the market, both home ownership and private rental housing, is subsidised heavily. Extremely heavily. Yet the market is still failing to provide for needs. Public housing, also heavily subsidised, is designed to cope with market failure but is inadequate to the task because the market is failing so badly.
In short, the market system is propped up with billions of dollars of public subsidy, yet has still fucked it up completely.
Back in the old days it was simply taken for granted that the market couldn't be trusted to provide for housing and the government simply built houses on a large scale. Official policy was to subvert the housing market by flooding the market with cheap public housing. It had some side effects of course, that is the trouble with a market economy, policy designed to alleviate inevitable failures of the market system only distort the market and create problems somewhere else.
Best to just get rid of the market completely.
>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.
Markets aren't evil in all circumstances. They are a very efficient (if cruel) way of dealing with shortages that cannot be alleviated. Markets mean that some people will starve and go without the means of life, while a few will be motivated to profit from the misery of there fellows, by improving the mean of production. But if people were going to die of starvation anyhow, the market system has not only done no harm, but actually resulted in an improvement. However, if there is no material reason why people should die of hunger and want, then the market is the wrong solution, because this is the result of markets.
>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.
No, democracy is also a means. I know you Americans think it is an end unto itself, but it is just a means to an end. Democracy and markets are incompatible means, you can have an economy that is democratic, or you can have an economy that is a market, you can't have both. Likewise, you can have a political system that is democratic, or a political system driven by the market (politicians who serve the highest bidder).
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas