ABSTRACT
A system of comprehensive economic planning is proposed, which is a different way to go about creating a comprehensive economic plan. It is reasonable to speculate that if the political system were democratic, and if key choices in central planning were made democratically, centrally planned economies need not have suffered from the ills of authoritarianism. In their rush to celebrate the triumph of capitalism much of the major media and many mainstream economists failed to focus on the most important reasons to reject central planning, and instead dismissed central planning for reasons that, on careful inspection, turn out not to be nearly as compelling as is commonly presumed. Finally, there are economic concepts and mathematical tools that are necessary for studying comprehensive, national economic planning of any kind. Those concepts are traditionally introduced in the context of explaining how a planning agency might calculate an efficient, comprehensive national economic plan as the solution to a constrained optimization problem.
