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Old 05-02-2021, 02:09 PM   #423 (permalink)
jwb
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I don't necessarily disagree with any of that though none of it (except maybe the WW2 example) actually rises to the level of an actual planned economy.

Again, having the government intervene with regulations or having them fund infrastructure, research etc is not a planned economy. It's a capitalist economy with a government that extracts tax revenue to fund initiatives that are better dealt with by the govt than by private enterprise.

That's a mixed economy. But it's a mixed economy that relies primarily on markets to raise the revenue that gets taxed in the first place. That's basically the only form of capitalism that has ever really existed on a broad scale.

The idea of completely unhinged markets with no govt intervention is just as theoretical as marx's communist vision. It doesn't exist in practice and I don't even think it's desirable. I'm not a libertarian. I prefer mixed economies.

I don't think any of this actually adds nuance to the efficacy of the 5 year plan and similar policies. Those policies went so far in the direction of govt control that they essentially destroyed or nearly destroyed the market infrastructure that they were extracting the resources from in the first place. They didn't invent a new method of farming, they simply seized the crop yields as property of the state and used them to buy industrial machinery from western capitalist countries.

So whether you wanna say it "worked" is actually tricky. It worked in the sense of industrialization and ramping up the productions of armaments on an industrial scale. It worked as far as the war effort is involved and, given the entirely dire circumstances the soviets were in you could even say it made good strategic sense, but that's once again biting the bullet on genocide which you don't want to do. You keep saying that's a separate question but it's not. You can't have the success without the consequences. Doesn't work that way.

But also, the soviets and even the chinese were in a particular situation which doesn't really apply to most of the rest of the world. Here in the west we have no use for a plan to rapidly industrialize through collective agriculture. Our agricultural sector is like you said hardly self sufficient and if anything we're deindustrializing as we outsource more and more manufacturing over seas. So we have no use for a soviet style 5 year plan, ethical questions aside.

The developing world also would probably be better served through gradual industrialization rather than attempts at rapid industrialization which will starve so many people. They don't have the same desperate need to industrialize quickly that the soviets did. So once again I really don't see much insight or utility in the rapid growth the ussr underwent. It just seems like a vague talking point that makes communism sound successful without having any actual pragmatic application
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