Planners don’t have enough information. They never do. It’s the nature of their problem. Looking into the future when all things are known, from the vantage point of the present, has its limitations. Planners don’t have enough information because they can’t have enough information. They can’t have enough information because that information doesn’t exist yet.
This fact of space and the direction of time does not deter them. They envision a harmonious future world with all people and things relating to one another in the most optimally sweet balance of sources and uses, comings and goings, beings and doings, with socially just outcomes, no big losers, and no big winners.
In their future, earned equity is the only value – but only insofar as the equity has no past, no family, and no inheritance. Those things involve capital and capital comes from profit. Profit means that something more was gained by one party in a transaction than was fairly deserved based on cost. Profit can never be earned because it’s essentially unfair. The Marxist theory that labor determines value doesn’t allow for earned value to exceed the cost of sustaining the labor.
So planners posit their sustainable future without profit. Their models have people only needing and receiving enough to sustain them in the lifestyles they’re accustomed to. After all, why should they need more? They’re just going to die in a few years like everyone else. Shouldn’t someone else have a fair chance? It’s only fair.
In their optimally sweet sustainable future, people live in the class they were born into. They don’t profit, they don’t accumulate wealth, they don’t move up in society, because there are no winners and losers when we all balance each other from each according to our abilities, to each according to our needs.
Well that’s all nice enough on paper. It just falls completely apart when you try to shoehorn human nature into the picture. Without motivation, people don’t work. A system that provides a subsistence level of motivation yields a subsistence level of human energy where everyone just subsists…in an optimally sweet harmonious and fair balance…at the level of the least common denominator.
I’m not saying planners are short sighted, at least not more than the nature of their avocation demands. One can see from reading their plans, zones and various diktats that they’re quite thorough. They’re no doubt doing the best they can in trying to solve a problem that, by its nature, can’t be solved.
What confounds, however, is what on earth they must see in their harmonized sustainable least common future to motivate them to try to bring it about? Imagine a sailor who dreams of a flat lake without a breath of air to move his boat. It just makes no sense.
B_Imperial