The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
Planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals and, as such, essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible.
The effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go; with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.
My view... would be that we are entering upon a new and interim society which is neither capitalist nor socialist, but in which we can achieve central planning without loss of individual initiative, by the mere process of absorbing initiative in the function of planning.
Central planning didn't work for Stalin or Mao, and it won't work for an entrepreneur either.
Central banks have gotten out of the central banking business and into the central planning business, meaning that they are devoted to raising up-if they can-economic growth and employment through the dubious means of suppressing interest rates and printing money. The nice thing about gold is that you can't print it.
Brute force is not our salvation, especially as directed by State central planning and done with little regard for the innocents.
The objective, clearly enunciated by the leaders of UNCED, is to bring about a change in the present system of independent nations. The future is to be World Government with central planning by the United Nations. Fear of environmental crises - whether real or not - is expected to lead to - compliance
The Statist deflects public scorn for the consequences of his own central planning by blaming the very industry he is sabotaging for supply dislocations and price hikes.
If the people are led to believe that scarce resources are best channeled in a direction that producers and consumers would not choose on their own, the result must necessarily be central planning.
Government central planning means over-riding other people's plans.
Let me say that I think the economic history of the last 150 years clearly shows that if you want to industrialize a country in a short period, let us say 20 years, and you don't have a well-developed private sector, entrepreneurial class, then central planning is important.
Central planning, judicial activism, and the nanny state all presume vastly more knowledge than any elite have ever possessed.
Are you really questioning the wisdom of central planning? Because the happy citizens of Cuba and North Korea beg to differ.
Central planning doesn't work. A little bit of it is a drag. A lot is fatal.
If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism, and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.
If the central contest of the twentieth century has pitted capitalism against socialism, then F. A. Hayek has been its central figure. He helped us to understand why capitalism won by a knockout. It was Hayek who elaborated the basic argument demonstrating that central planning was nothing else but an impoverishing fantasy.
The free market is not only a more efficient decision maker than even the wisest central planning body, but even more important, the free market keeps economic power widely dispersed.
Fundamentalist religion is the most pervasive vision of central planning, though many fundamentalists may oppose human central planning as a usurpation or "playing God.This is consistent with the fundamentalist vision of an unconstrained God and a highly constrained man.
or simply:
