I'm actually somewhat confused by what constitutes "central planning" here, considering that there are tax breaks on everything from home ownership to agriculture.
Hell, providing federal loans, grants, and tax writeoffs for higher education could be considered "central planning"- if the purpose of government isn't just to compensate for negative market externalities, but also to encourage positive ones, then there are a whole lot of things that make plenty of sense to have done centrally. I think funding/incentivizing certain research will actually help many large businesses because it lets the government foot the bill for things that a business will not want to fund on its own(in cases where it's more cost-effective to piggyback onto existing research than it is to potentially hit a few blind alleys before making a breakthrough).
If someone really wants to take it to ludicrous ends, I suppose that even national defense constitutes central planning of a sort.
The funny thing, in a black comedic way, is that once people get a clue about the oil issue, we have the choices of either getting a solution in place faster and fouling up the environment more, or taking more time and fouling up the economy and peoples' immediate lives more.
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chiming
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Date: 2011-05-02 09:58 pm (UTC)From:Hell, providing federal loans, grants, and tax writeoffs for higher education could be considered "central planning"- if the purpose of government isn't just to compensate for negative market externalities, but also to encourage positive ones, then there are a whole lot of things that make plenty of sense to have done centrally. I think funding/incentivizing certain research will actually help many large businesses because it lets the government foot the bill for things that a business will not want to fund on its own(in cases where it's more cost-effective to piggyback onto existing research than it is to potentially hit a few blind alleys before making a breakthrough).
If someone really wants to take it to ludicrous ends, I suppose that even national defense constitutes central planning of a sort.
The funny thing, in a black comedic way, is that once people get a clue about the oil issue, we have the choices of either getting a solution in place faster and fouling up the environment more, or taking more time and fouling up the economy and peoples' immediate lives more.