Re: Participatory Planning

[FAC_BROSSER@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

     With regard to environmental impacts it may be a bold
claim to say that capitalist economies have done better at
equivalent levels of output than socialist ones, but it is a
claim that can probably be defended.  No capitalist economy
ever produced disasters on the scale of Chernobyl or the Aral
Sea, and these directly reflected Soviet planners' decisions.
     This has always been a great irony since in principle
a planned socialist economy _ought_ to be able to account for
such things.  Indeed, in his original arguments, Lange listed
Pigovian externalities (i.e., environmental costs) as one of
the things that the planned economy would handle in a superior
manner to the market capitalist ones.  Lange in effect ran
through a standard textbook list of micro "market failures"
plus macro instability and unequal income distributions and
said the planners can overcome all that and come up with the
true Pareto optimum with macro stability and reasonable income
equality.  Sure sounded nice.
     In any case what happened in the actual socialist economies
probably reflected a combination of fixation on material product
growth with (especially in the USSR) gigantomaniac capital
investment approaches (contrary to the usual story that these
happened because of "free capital," it probably reflected Russian
culture which has always been even more gigantomaniac than that of
Texas.  In the Kremlin one can find the "world's largest bell"
(never rung because it cracked) and the "worlds's largest cannon"
(never fired because it wasn't functional)) along with a lack of
political democracy.  The latter was probably most crucial because
it meant that the victims of pollution had no means to oppose the
policies of the polluters, whereas in the US we got the EPA after
awhile, imperfect as it may be.  Indeed the push for perestroika
and democratization throughout Eastern Europe was heavily driven
by environmentalist movements.
Barkley Rosser
James Madison University