Question to dd re PEN-L digest 81

[Hari Kumar]

ORIGINAL MESSAGE was from Digest 81: From DD: READS AS FOLLOWS:
"Subject:
Both agreement and disagreement here.  Need to separate:
a) critiques of central planning per se
from
b) critiques of Stalin's version of it.
The Soviet Union for most of its life worked on the basis of Stalin's version of a 
command economy, whereby, as Carrol puts it, production decisions were made 
politically.  So the critique of planning based on incentives is orthogonal to the 
case of the Soviet Union, as it only tells us about a certain class of problem one 
would have in trying to optimise production in a command economy.  Since Stalinist 
Russia didn't care about optimising its output (Stalin was extremely suspicious of 
people who tried to optimise production, referring to them as "cyberneticians"), this 
critique isn't really all that relevant.  After all, you can't get lost if you're not 
going anywhere.
On the other hand, Kantorovich and Novozhilov, the two greatest members of the 
cybernetician school of Soviet economics, did tend toward the opinion that market 
signals were needed in order to formulate an optimal plan (note that we're referring 
to *goods* markets here, not capital markets).
I don't think it's really necessary to take the incentives critique too seriously; 
after all, if it were true, we would expect organisations like BP and the US Army to 
be significantly less efficient than they in fact are. The problem with the Soviet 
Union was that it specifically, intentionally and for political reasons, decided that 
it was ideologically unsound to make plans for the world as it was rather than the 
world as Stalin wanted it to be.
dd"
COMMENT AND QUESTION
I realise that certain matters are apparently so "well understood" - that they do not 
require substantiation for the majority of readers on this list. I will respectfully 
disagree that wheareas comments reagrding viewpoints of M,E, and bourgeois 
philosophers - appear to demand citation - the most casual references to Stalin can be 
tossed off with no citation. Please allow me to ask for your reference.  Also I 
apologise for the dealy - I am only now catching up.
Hari Kumar