Michael Pollak over at Left Business Observer:
Here is what mainstream economics thinks we know about managing the economy:
There was a debate in the 1920s and 1930s and central planning lost. It was proven, by people like Hayek and others, that central planning couldn’t work. Its outcomes would always be inferior to the market, and usually far inferior. Over the next century, with some fits and starts, everyone eventually accepted this conclusion and that’s where we are today. All that remains is a residual fight between those who think we ought to regulate a little bit around the edges and those who think every little bit hurts. That is the current division of the world’s ruling class, between neoliberals and ultras.
The problem is that large-scale planning is everywhere, and it started pretty much the same time as it was supposedly proven impossible. Admittedly it was still somewhat new even in the very last years of that debate. James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution in 1941 with the same air that many people wrote about the computer revolution in our lifetimes: it’s going to change everything. And then it did, vastly accelerated by the large-scale economic planning of World War II.
More here.
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