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CAPITALIST PLANNING AND SOCIALIST CHAOS
This essay shows that capitalism has all-pervasive but unrecognized economic planning. The separate, individual plans of all of its hundreds of millions, indeed, billions of individual participants, are harmonized, coordinated, and integrated by the price system and profit motive. Socialism, in contrast, is a chaotic “anarchy of production,†made that way by the stupendously ignorant and arrogant attempt to monopolize economic planning by a handful of government officials who prohibit economic planning by everyone else. By its nature, this attempt to make the brains of so few meet the needs of so many has no more prospect of success than would an attempt to make the legs of so few the vehicle for carrying the weight of so many. Rational economic planning for the entire economic system requires the freedom of each participant in the economic system to plan for himself. What the reader of this essay will learn: •Capitalism Has All-Pervasive But Unrecognized Economic Planning •The Economic Planning of Capitalism Rests on the Price System •Prices Coordinate, Harmonize, and Integrate All the Various Separate Individual Plans that Are Made Throughout the Economic System •The Price System Depends on the Profit Motive and Competition •The Profit Motive and Competition in Turn Depend on Private Ownership of the Means of Production, i.e., on Capitalism •In Destroying Private Ownership of the Means of Production, Socialism Destroys the Foundations of the Price System and thus Economic Planning •Because of Its Destruction of the Price System, Economic Planning under Socialism Would Require the Existence of an Omniscient Deity Willing to Plan the Socialist System •The Economic System Requires Continuous Replanning, Which Is Impossible under Socialism but Routine under Capitalism •The Problem of Socialism Is that It Requires the Planning of the Economic System without Benefit of a Division of Labor in the Planning Process, Which Is Impossible •The Actual Planning of Socialism Is Not Rational Central Planning but Chaotic, Decentralized Partial Planning •Compounding Chaos under Socialism: Disinterested Suppliers and Customers •Socialism Represents the Prohibition of Economic Planning by Everyone except a Handful of Government Officials Who Make Planning their Monopoly and then Are Incapable of Planning