[ZenoArrow]

> "question for the anti-free market people: how do you centralize the production of things like toilet paper? How do you decide how much toilet paper to make, in the absence of a free market?"

Why do you have to centralise it? You could split the task into regions. How many regions? Enough regions until it becomes efficient at measuring and responding to needs.

To use a phrase... think global, act local.

[paganel]

> Enough regions until it becomes efficient at measuring and responding to needs.

How do you respond to needs if it's all opaque? For example, for a city of 100,000 people how do you decide how many sheets of toilet paper you need? Or razor blades? Or tampons? I know it sounds all frivolous, but the lack of razor blades was mentioned even by Orwell in his "1984", and as for tampons, I first saw them after 1990, the central economy planners from my country had decided that cotton wool was good enough for women.

[TeMPOraL]

And how does the free market solve this problem? By overproducing the shit out of everything, letting it rot on the shelves and then throwing it away. This is the cost associated with the abundance of products - especially short-lived ones - in the stores.

Yes, in recent years the market learned to optimize, to run on supply lines with very little buffering at endpoints. Still - the producers get information about how much to make from the sales at endpoints. Why the same scheme should not be available to central planners? Does centralization somehow preclude from measuring at the endpoints?

Hell, if you really look at it, isn't the optimizations market learned basically central planning, but in the hands of private planners and not state ones?

[andrenth]

Because no central planner can have all the information about every aspect of the market in order to plan correctly. This is impossible not only because of the volume of information, but because the information in question is highly subjective (they amount to personal preferences). So the "optimization" has to happen in a distributed manner, with each agent taking in account his own preferences and the information available to him.

Finally, a centrally planned economy precludes the entrepreneurial function.

[ZenoArrow]

So you don't manage it centrally, you manage it regionally and monitor stock levels.

One item taken = one sale, so you have the same level of information to manage the economy with.

[andrenth]

Monitoring stock levels is hardly all you need to manage an economy.

You need to consider innovation, the creation of the very same information agents in an economy use to decide the actions they take. This is the entrepreneurial function. If production is ruled by coercion of a central planner, you eliminate that, and then what incentive is there for anyone to produce?

In this scenario, at the very best you get crony capitalism; at the worst, you get communism.

[ZenoArrow]

> "Monitoring stock levels is hardly all you need to manage an economy."

I didn't say it was, what I did say is that you lose no 'sales' information from removing money from the process of transferring goods from the manufacturer to the consumer. In other words, removing money doesn't make managing an economy harder.

> "You need to consider innovation, the creation of the very same information agents in an economy use to decide the actions they take. This is the entrepreneurial function. If production is ruled by coercion of a central planner, you eliminate that, and then what incentive is there for anyone to produce?"

Innovation can happen faster without the overhead of competition. What you want to encourage instead is collaboration. Innovation does not have to be a top down affair if you remove money from the economy.

Whilst it's not a perfect example, consider the development methodology of open source. Whilst there are problems with the open source approach, I'd argue that shortage of innovation is not one of those problems.

[ZenoArrow]

>"How do you respond to needs if it's all opaque? For example, for a city of 100,000 people how do you decide how many sheets of toilet paper you need? Or razor blades? Or tampons?"

You monitor stock levels.

The same functions that apply to a commercial enterprise would apply to a non-commercial one. You'd still have a 'merchandising department' monitoring stock levels, ensuring enough weeks of cover (based on usage trends), setting when to manufacture and how much, etc...

In addition, by having multiple sources of toilet roll you can temporarily boost the stock in one region if another region has a small surplus.

I'm sorry that you had to live through shortages, it's probably no consolation that the problems were caused by mismanagement, but from what I can see they aren't an intrinsic part of communism.