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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

All demands are not created alike ;).

Certain basic needs are definitely not created artificially. So every human being has requirement for food, clothing, shelter and the very minimum. The more I think about it, the more it seems like, for instance, primary sectors could be handled so much better with central planning. e.g. instead of growing artificially subsidized corn, grow only an amount of corn that is required by the economy (perhaps a little extra). Continuously adjust production to meet demand if it increases.

Demand for fancy food is more artificial. Maybe I love oysters but you like quail instead. So there could be a free market operating for oysters and quails.

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Provision of basic necessities happens to be the cases where central planning has failed most spectacularly in practice. The most recent example would be what's happening in Venezuela today. The most infamous example would be the Great Leap Forward in Mao's China, which led to the single most deadly famine in human history.

There's a reason why nobody tries to declare food a human right and give it away for free, even though people die if they don't eat.

Yes but food for example is a thing markets work great on, there's pricing transparency and it's easy to switch suppliers and shop for better prices. The same cannot be said for healthcare for example where it's pretty clear markets fail precisely because it's nigh impossible to do those things. Central planning works well when markets can't. No one is going to shop for the best emergency room price while having a heart attack, nor can you even get transparent pricing from hospitals; you can't know what you owe until after you've have the services performed because they can't know up front what services you're going to require.

You're examples are, pardon my language, spectacularly bad. Its important to differentiate genuine attempts at solving the problem of central planning v/s populist dreams of utopia. In fact Venezuela was much less central planning and more short term grabbing resources and making the available for free, without any consideration of planning or sustainability whatsoever. The Great Leap Forward was, again, a crazy Utopian plan where it was hoped that China would reach the goal of industrialization, again without any specific ways in which to achieve that.

The Soviet Union and East Germany seem to be the only states which attempted Central Planning genuinely, and from this article and other resources, it seems the problem was simply too complex even then... at that time.

Not to mention that in the USSR and East Germany the process, while the attempts may have been earnest, they were still heavily politicized and often unscientific in their approach. Aside from the lack of computational capacity, there was still a sort of economic Lysenkoism to deal with.

Or, like, I order the quail dish with my phone, or use my phone to let it be known that I would be interested in quail dishes costing less than $15 or something, and you'd do the same for oysters. That demand and potential demand would then be aggregated with everyone else's by the big central computer, which would calculate a price based upon the supply capacity and cost of production (including how those costs are affected by other demands in the economy). That price determination occurs organically in a free market, but it's not perfectly efficient and involves a lot of redundancy and waste. With sufficient computational power it might be possible to formalize that process and make it more efficient.

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