However this is a matter of degree; your own wikipedia article seemed to point out that “After all, most corporations are essentially ‘centrally planned economies”, but regardless; how much of the economy must be under control of centralized power interests before it’s a centrally planned economy? How much of the economy must be “planned” by each market participant?

What if 83% of all manufacturing in a country was for one market entity(which also happens to be the state?) Although I’ve lost the reference, the Soviet Union sat at between 90-95% of the economy
being taken up by the state; If not 83% what about 70% That’s still pretty massive, especially for a large market. Must the entire economy be decided by the state(even the former Soviet Union did not…there were some decisions made by it’s members, and there also the black market, would that make the USSR a non-centrally planned economy)?

As far as your second point, I guess you have defined the concept of central planning much differently than the standard definition. What you are describing here may be concentration of power with respect to decisions, but that concentration of power rests in the corporate world (ie. the private sectorl) rather than in government.

In your last paragraph you come closer to an argument based on the standard definition of central planning. So, with all due respect, you seem to be all over the place without a clear idea of what it is you are talking about. Central planning as I have used the concept in this exchange we are having is government planning and control of the market, pure and simple. Corporate planning is by it’s very definition in the private sector. A concentration (centralization) of corporate power is a totally different animal.

1) “There’s not much central planning done in the US”

Surely you jest; the US is involved with more central planning than any other country in the world. Ever heard of “the pentagon”? Their budget dwarfs the budget of most of the centralized economies in history (and unlike my next example, they keep a fairly tight grip on the political freedoms of their employees can consume).

2) Why is it that the central planning which does not conform to your belief structure as bad(infrastructure and firms) isn’t seen as central planning? If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it’s a duck — firms are government-like structures. We can argue whether or not they need to exist but they do exist, whether or not they turn out to be a good thing, but they do develop every single characteristic that centralized power structures always does, pretty much without fail. Power, once centralized, always seeks to centralized it’s authority further, unless there’s checks and balances. Always.

You’re arguments for Infrastructure, albeit your opinion, and a completely valid one, I think are misguided; You’re arguing for centralized control of resources, by an authority claiming to represent other people; I think you’re well aware of how bad central planning can work, so I don’t think I have to go into that in this post, but you seem to be afraid to observe that the central planning that you don’t like, functions exactly the same as the central planning which hat you do seem to agree with.

Japan’s big corporations are not its government. The kind of central planning I’m talking about is that done by government. Saskatchewan has lots of them. Their called crown corporations. And yes, I know the US propped up Japan (and Germany) after WWII. The question that needs to be asked is how is it that the US was able to do that and stare down the Soviet Union until it collapsed while they were at it. There’s not much central planning done in the US, although they have flirted with it from time to time.

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but I seem to remember education being one of Japan’s higher priorities before and after the war;
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And the value the Japanese put on education is part and parcel of the value system I was referring to in my earlier post. It’s long been a core part of their culture. China is the same. That’s why they are now surging ahead and communist in name only. They still have too much central planning, though. But at least their central planning isn’t causing massive starvation like it did in Chairman Mao’s day. Watch out for the day when they shake off the last vestiges of that system.

Actually, that idea is also right out of Adam Smith, and a good reason why we keep markets around is that they do just that.

Also, I find it amazing how in the same post you’ve chastised central planning and yet argued in favour of central planning being implemented in the form of ‘infrastructure’. (While I’m not 100% sure, ) Japan seems also to be the quintessential poster-child for central-planning in a lot of respects; there are rather huge firms in Japan and those firms control one hell of a lot of resources, yet to your acknowledgement have managed their resources such that the Japanese economy as a whole isn’t doing too bad. Also; a lot of US investment went into making japan functional, again, taken directly from US taxpayers, and often invested on behalf of the US government/their “central authority”.

Of course, the most important thing in that case is probably education; Again, I am not sure on the specifics, but I seem to remember education being one of Japan’s higher priorities before and after the war; their situation just proves that properly educated people can build a functioning country faster than a group of nonliterate, noneducated people can. No big surprise there.

I would also note that one of the big factors in lifting people up into economic health and on to wealth is free trade. Most lefties are opposed to this because they believe in fairy tales about a supposed inherently exploitative nature of trade. This idea that economies should be “directed to benefit mankind” is straight out of Karl Marx. It doesn’t work that way. It’s when individuals in multitudes set about each looking for opportunities to make a living by producing things that others want and need, that economies thrive. The Big Brother central planning approach has proved to be a dismal failure. The main reason the Soviet Union collapsed was because the centrally planned economy could not put bread or milk on the shelves of the stores. The main reason economies fail to develop is corruption in government and lack of functioning infrastructure that those governments should be building and maintaining.

The only plausible explanation I can think of that might excuse our greed is IF there is some kind of unknown tipping point, where if we share to be equal, we doom ourselves to the kind of poverty if the scales of power tip instead of level. If it’s human nature that we can’t allow our neighbours to be equals, then we may always be doomed to have a grossly rich population that is small, and a large one that is poor. I don’t want that, because it endangers us all.

What I think is simplistic is our North American economy. It has no direction designed to benefit humankind, only individuals who already have more than enough to live a lifetime and more. The purpose of that kind of economy is selfish in nature, it’s little wonder it ends up repressing people with less power. Saying there is 80-20 quality disparity in the world is the opposite of simplistic. It’s looking at the BIG PICTURE. What’s overly simplistic is looking at North America and judging Canada based on America, instead of also against Haiti, and Peru.

All this doesn’t absolve Haitians (for example) from picking themselves up, yet the economy we’ve constructed for the world (because face it, we dominate and that’s why we’re at the G7) doesn’t give them a ghost of a chance.