raghu: > The key question is how do you protect society when a central planner > makes a disastrous mistake?
who decides what actions counts as "mistakes"? A dictator might gain something from a disaster such as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (as I see it) and would so not count it as a mistake. After all, it returned Mao to power for awhile, so it was successful in his terms. The "Great Leap Forward" might have produced some kind of benefit to him, too. (I doubt it, since if I remember my Chinese history correctly, the other leaders of the CP of China pushed him from the pinnacle of power because the GLP didn't serve _their_ purposes well.) the key thing is to subordinate any central planning (or decentralized planning-by-market) to democracy. Under popular sovereignty, it's the people who have the right to make mistakes and to learn from them. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
