ABSTRACT
Teach a parrot to say “supply and demand”—so an academic witticism went a generation ago—and he will be a classical economist. Every world-view has its slogans and its sloganeers, as well as its expositors and critics. And the slogan of latter-day collectivism has become “planning.” In itself, as a slogan or even as an attitude to life, it would be idle to discuss its merits. Lionel Robbins says there is planning, in the sense of deliberate choice, in every act of an entrepreneur in free-market economy. Democratic planning may be defined as the technical coordination, by disinterested experts, of consumption, production, investment, trade, and income distribution in accordance with social objectives set by bodies representative of the majority. For a long time the liberal world called the socialist planning of the Soviet Union an “experiment.” In economic terms that experiment has amply proved itself.
