Re: [Pen-l] Paul Davidson sums up

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

raghu:
> The key question is how do you protect society when a central planner
> makes a disastrous mistake?

who decides what actions counts as "mistakes"? A dictator might gain
something from a disaster such as the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution (as I see it) and would so not count it as a mistake. After
all, it returned Mao to power for awhile, so it was successful in his
terms. The "Great Leap Forward" might have produced some kind of
benefit to him, too. (I doubt it, since if I remember my Chinese
history correctly, the other leaders of the CP of China pushed him
from the pinnacle of power because the GLP didn't serve _their_
purposes well.)

the key thing is to subordinate any central planning (or decentralized
planning-by-market) to democracy. Under popular sovereignty, it's the
people who have the right to make mistakes and to learn from them.
-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l