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Edited on Sat Feb-02-08 11:25 PM by originalpckelly
Is inventing something a form of planning?
The problem with the assumptions you make is that you fail to take into account the fact that they are producing intellectual property, a design of a factory that is simple enough for workers with few skills to work in. The inventor who creates the original idea of a product.
Planning would mainly fall into the category of regulating production. In the sense of, "How many of x product do we need to make?"
Consumption is a market process, if there is a surplus of goods/services, then prices will decline, and profit motive will decline as well. As profit motive declines, the incentive to produce more of the good declines as well.
Beyond that, however, inside a corporation, planning occurs.
Instead of workers' pay floating dependent upon the amount of work they do, but rather upon the amount of hours worked, it is possible to have a surplus of labor. Instead of self-firing employees, who simply lose the will/want to work at an unsuccessful company and leave it, thereby reducing the surplus of labor, it is necessary to have a person figure out how many employees to fire.
In addition, the latency of supply surplus/deficit correction increases, at least theoretically, as the organization increases in size. Meaning that in a large corporation, it is much easier for inefficiency to continue without self-correcting, because there are more resources to use up in a corporation before it is forced to correct the inefficiency for the purpose of survival than say in a small business.
Finally, other tasks such as buying goods in a retail setting, are planning intensive in a big corporation like Wal-Mart, whereas those tasks are usually placed on the owners/managment/workers themselves in a small mom and pop shop. Instead of hiring employees simply to manage the supply of goods, they can simply do it themselves.
The most important difference involves the knowledge needed to plan. Mom and pop work in the store and can easily see, without using too many resources, how many of product x is needed in their store. Corporate bureaucrat in charge of buying at Wal-Mart isn't in the store, but works at a datacenter, and is reliant upon expensive computers to tell them how much of product is on the shelf of their store.
Advanced database technology makes the task of remote planning easier, but it is more expensive than just having mom and pop know what's on their shelves.
This is just one example of what I mean to say.
I think our system exists because rich people want no alternatives, and they've fixed the market to prevent these other ideas from succeeding. There are so many unfair pro-corporate laws in our nation, that the tables are stacked against poor old mom and pop, even though they may be a freer, more democratic system of capitalism.
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