Anyway, planning the whole economy centrally has the same flaw in it that anarchists see in the state - power. Too much power. It is simply too much power concentrated in too few hands.
I like anarchy of production. I think it's a good thing. It lets people make the same economic decisions in competing ways. Most of the time there is not a way to do somethign that is clearly best so why should one plan get an official imprimature and the other one not? I think that if workers owned the means of production there would be more and not less anarchy of production and I look forward to it.
Capitalists hate competition. That's why there have to be anti-trust laws. I say the more anarchy of production, the better.
As far as central planning goes, it's not that one can't conceive a good planning apparatus, it's just that the more you think about it the more you will realize that a tremendous amount of information has to be digested and some arithmetic notion like "cost accounting" is completely inadequate, for two reasons.
First, it's impossible to model the real economy on anything short of a number of super-computers.
Second, and most importantly, your data have to be real. There is a huge difference between accounting (which relies on estimates of what things are worth) and marking to market (which actually requires using real prices on an ongoing basis). In the age of accounting, all great financial screw-ups are based on the detachment of the accounting model from reality. How, in a non-money system, do you possibly test your models against reality? In a centrally-planned economy reality is what the planners say it is. And then you find out they were wrong - in a big way.
No matter how unrealistic capitalist companies get, they either have to sell their products or their financial instruments into a real market where people have to part with real money to buy them. I don't know of any polling technology that adequately mimics the marketplace.
I know that it's confusing because I seem to be simultaneously praising capitalism and socialism but I use Marx as my model. He did the same thing. And on this list I don't think I really have to derogate captialism all the time since I think we are all pretty well persuaded that it has serious flaws.
I also think the fact that you can't find a group of leftists who do not find the Soviet model of central planning seriously flawed is significant. If we're not convinced then it's safe to say that nobody else is. Even Charles who apparently adores five-year plans intensely dislikes the kind of state that could enforce them. So I think the task of socialism now is to steer the anarchy of production in a more positive direction (and possibly creating even more anarchy and more production) rather than supposing we can slap controls on it and make it do what we want.
boddi