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Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

Central planning clearly works fairly well internally for millions of corporations around the world (see: Theory of the firm, http://www.economist.com/node/17730360). It will never be so simple as "privatize everything for best results".

I wish the discussion here would elevate beyond this libertarian propaganda level.

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Corporations have pretty excellent feedback in the form of profits that result from voluntary transactions with customers. The success of a state is measured in many ways, many of which are disagreed upon and/or take decades to measure. On top of that, no one interacts voluntarily with a centrally planned state in the sense that if the state supplies all of something that is necessary, people will buy it, regardless of the government's prowess in delivering the goods. A corporation will quickly go out of business or change tack if it can't sell goods profitably. I'd say to make your analogy work better we'd have to have central planning where citizens can opt out pretty easily and that opting out causes the government to actually change.

Large companies resemble governments in some ways since they have people not directly connected to 'market validation' mechanism: administrators, bureaucrats, people dedicated to keeping thing going etc. Internally, the larger a company is, the more it begins to look state-like and socialistic.

Corporations themselves are also in practice intimately intertwined with government. They depend directly or indirectly on procurement, but also the legal system. The more complex regulations, the bigger the economy of scales a corporation can use. There are also specific laws that make competition illegal in some fields like telcos and friendly tax regimes for big players only.

You may note corporations are the biggest defenders of free markets when it suits them, then quickly turn the page when they require some special subsidies, bail-outs or laws to hobble their competition.

> Central planning clearly works fairly well internally for millions of corporations

Can you describe the difference between leaving a broken corporation (as a consumer or employee) and leaving a broken nation state?

I'm not an economist, but governments usually have what is called "monopoly on the physical means of coercion", there's geographic limits on human movement that are much reduced for capital, and governments are more likely than not "too big to fail", a status only few corporations achieve.

My point is not to advocate central planning, I'm a big fan of markets. I just think some defenses of them are very disingenuous and poorly thought-out.

I'd be curious to see how something like private defense agencies [1] would work out in practice.

[1]: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/Machinery_of_Freed...

While people live under one government, there are millions of corporations. For every successful corporation, many more have gone out of business. Many of the successful ones today will be dead within a decade. When a corporation's governance structure doesn't work, it dies and frees up resources for other endeavors.

Central planning has worked well for exactly zero countries around the world.

> When a corporation's governance structure doesn't work, it dies and frees up resources for other endeavors.

Yeah, sure. As if we didn't have "too big to fail" in the last years. Maybe a history book could refresh your memory.

I've heard it said that central planning in the Soviet Union would have worked with modern communication and information management systems. But on the other hand, planning for one corporation is far simpler than planning for an entire economy.

A big part of the problem is always corruption. But can machines plan for an entire economy?

True. Doing favors for money/gifts is standard in much of the world.

Corporations generally do not have the ability or perceived authority to absolutely determine and enforce rules in a geographic area, which is one of the defining characteristics of government and a primary reason that central planning tends to not work with governments.

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