>>> Umm--are you arguing that multinational corporations don't do
>>> "central planning"? Really?
>>
>> Yes, I am saying that.
>>
>> Multinational corporations don't do central planning; they don't plan
>> whole economies. If a corporation planned a whole economy, it
>> wouldn't be a corporation anymore, it would be a central planning
>> ministry.
>
> You're setting up a straw man: no society has "planned a whole economy".
Yes they have! Or at least they kept trying. It was called "central planning."
In integrally-planned economies like the USSR and East Germany, the only unplanned sectors were those that sprang up and were tolerated or officially ignored because they were useful safety valves to compensate for the failures of the *plans*.
> The centralized planning that occurs in a multinational corporation
> like Walmart is clearly comparable to the scope of the planning in the
> examples of socialist production I've provided. It's just that the
> goal of the planning at Walmart is private profit rather than the
> common good.
To make sure we're talking about the same thing here, let's be clear: Aside from gift-giving, all transactions between firms and/or households are *either* market transactions *or* administratively determined (i.e., planned) transactions. Those are the only two kinds. There's no third option. So to the extent that an economy is "partly not planned" -- to that extent it is "partly a market economy."
So yes, the planning Walmart does is a lot like the planning the local library board does - they are both the type of planning that routinely happen in a capitalist market society. However, what you've apparently been arguing is: "because it can be done this easily for Walmart/the library, therefore it can be done this easily for the economy as a whole." This is a fallacy of composition - the (in this case) false notion that what is true of the part must be true of the whole. Once the whole economy becomes non-market (i.e., planned), the planning is no longer anything like what the library board does.
SA