Only by straw-manning the idea. What you've written there doesn't disprove anything. We've seen in real life that a large corporation can plan a proportion of an economy. What you have to prove, in order to repudiate central planning, is prove that there exists some maximum proportion of an economy that can be planned. And even then, a simple workaround would be to artificially recreate such maximums within the central structure. I think you're just not very imaginative.
A corporation can execute the creation of consumer or producer goods for sale to the market, earning a profit greater than the sum of the inputs. Corporations execute on that specific mission with a goal of maximizing profit. A side-effect of this (in a truly free market) is to ensure the customer, who should be able to freely to purchase from any producer, is maximally satisfied. It also follows that a corporation will try and reduce their costs on all possible axes - from inputs, to labor, to production time, to tax mitigation, etc.
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).
1. we do not charter corporations so that they may chase profits, we charter them because we believe that without limited liability, certain things that we as a society (or as a monarch) want done will not happen. If that was not the case, we would not have corporations at all, simply partnerships between various sized groups of individuals who decided to risk their personal fortune (in all senses) on some venture that could not be accomplished alone.
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.
I used corporation but I meant private enterprise - the legal mechanism is unimportant.
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.
On the contrary, the legal mechanism is vitally important.
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.
I don't understand how these things are connected. The market being free doesn't have anything to do with whether or not the customer is satisfied - take telecom in the U.S. for example. Competition is sparse and nobody is satisfied.
What you're describing is a buyer's market, which is only one case out of many.
Telecom has little competition because of high barriers to entry, not regulation.
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.
This is why I said "in a truly free market" in my explanation. Telecom is far from a truly free market. No matter how much capital you have, you cannot enter the market as a new provider, without regulators approving a huge variety of things, not just wavelength and radio stuff but also the right to exist at all as a provider of such telecom services. This introduces all manner of possibilities for corruption, lobbying, etc. that lead to monopolies.
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.
That is a political decision that the USA made, and one could that also be changed through the political process - by subsidizing all manner of social benefits (healthcare, housing, food, and so on) the US government enables private businesses to hire employees at a lower wage without social upheaval. I would argue this is inferior to providing no social benefits whatsoever in order that corporations would have to bear more of the cost, rather than indirectly through taxes.
> We've seen in real life that a large corporation can plan a proportion of an economy. What you have to prove, in order to repudiate central planning, is prove that there exists some maximum proportion of an economy that can be planned.
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.
You mean examples why they didn't. Just because Starship exploded at launch it does not prove all Starships are going to explode. Likewise, if you have a handful of trials of planned economy it does not imply the whole concept is infeasible. Stating otherwise is fallacious.
The problem with that argument is you have to argue that the USSR failed because of central planning, when the reality is their centrally planned economy succeeded in industrializing a majority-peasant agricultural country, defeating the nazis in world war 2, and launching a man into space.
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.
That's redefining what "centrally planned" means. Corporations are subject to competitive pressures: they rapidly lose their ability to "plan" when they stop "planning" well. There's no comparable mechanism when it comes to top-down government planning.
Corporations fail a lot in their plans. On top, not certain that the planning aspect is what gives rise to corporations in the first place (vs., e.g, transaction costs between independent actors if there where no corporation).
> We've seen in real life that a large corporation can plan a proportion of an economy.
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
