Auckland Councillors and mayoral hopefuls promote their “Unitary Plan.” Their planners talk it up, as if without their plan no planning would be done. And voters accept it all, as if what they do themselves every day is not planning, that capitalism itself has economic planning…
“They uncritically accept … the Marxian dogma that capitalism is an anarchy of production and that socialism represents rational economic planning.
People were (and most still are) in the position of Moliere’s M. Jourdain, who never realised that what he was speaking all his life was prose. For, living in a capitalist society, people are literally surrounded by economic planning, and yet do not realise that it exists.
Every day, there are countless businessmen who are planning to expand or contract their firms, who are planning to introduce new products or discontinue old ones, planning to open new branches or close down existing ones, planning to change their methods of production or continue with their present methods, planning to hire additional workers or let some of their present ones go. And every day, there are countless workers planning to improve their skills, change their occupations or places of work, or to continue with things as they are; and consumers, planning to buy homes, cars, stereos, steak or hamburger, and how to use the goods they already have—for example, to drive to work or to take the train, instead.
Yet people deny the name planning to all this activity and reserve it for the feeble efforts of a handful of government officials, who, having prohibited the planning of everyone else, presume to substitute their knowledge and intelligence for the knowledge and intelligence of tens of [thousands]...
- George Reisman, from his one-hundredth birthday tribute to Ludwig Von Mises.
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