If you try to extend "producing goods" to "every good possible for all people", it cannot possibly work, because a corporation cannot even satisfy the needs of consumers within their narrow band of production (or else competitors wouldn't exist, and further enhancements of products would be unnecessary).
2. in situations of monopoly or close to it, corporations do in fact indulge in central planning for an entire economy. You may choose to put your faith in the idea that their chasing profits mean that their decisions will be the ones we would make as a society, but there's no inherent reason for this to be true. There are often multiple pathways to the same profit, with different side effects and different levels of organizational commitment; as a society we might prefer a corporation to pick one route, but it picks the other.
Private entities are specifically exempted from political manipulation. Government makes the rules, but a private entity (barring a few special cases) is free to operate within the law without a bureaucrat embedded in the office. Therefore the society might want a corporation to make some decision, but generally it can’t force them to by direct action.
If every venture that involved gathering together a group of people to bring sufficient capital, labor and IP to bear on a problem or opportunity ALSO faced the personal ruin of its participants should it fail or cause injury or death or despoilment, it would be extremely difficult to convince such organizations to form.
It is vitally important for such organizations to have limited liability for their participants i.e. for society to indemnify the participants against potential harmful outcomes from their endeavor.
What you're describing is a buyer's market, which is only one case out of many.
I just don't understand how to square this
> because a corporation cannot even satisfy the needs of consumers within their narrow band of production (or else competitors wouldn't exist, and further enhancements of products would be unnecessary).
against the reality that there are monopolies that don't satisfy consumers and that some companies profitably degrade their products over time.
IMO the main cause of monopolistic behavior is government regulation rather than natural tendencies of the free market (but that's up for debate and my position is unpopular).
Oh please, they get to rob workers of necessities of life and capitalize on their pity wages. Take a look at Walmart employees on food stamps and talk about producing value equal to more than the sum of the parts; the government is subsidizing their food.
If the examples of large corporations planning a proportion of an economy count as an argument for why central planning could work, then surely the examples of actual, centrally-planned economies failing should count as arguments for why they don't. I mean, don't toss out the actual examples for the metaphorical ones.
I'm not blind to the many flaws of the soviet union, but it's a bit absurd to point to it as a failure of central planning.
They aren't planing anything, they are responding to the environment. Sometimes they get it right and profit, other times they get it wrong and fail.
No we haven’t. Look at the list of Fortune 500 companies today vs 50 years ago. The landscape is completely different. IBM was the most innovative company in America and now it's seen as a dinosaur. Corporations die each year. It’s cutthroat; your business is more likely to fail than succeed. The idea that Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell could do a better job planning the economy is laughable