| > Central planning of food production has created famines with no equal in history. The Farm Bill in the US (right now) centrally plans food, and subsidizes some crops to below the cost of production. Individuals in the US spend less of their paychecks on food than any other country in the world, and in fact, so much so, that 40% of food in the US is wasted each year and individuals still spend less than anyone else in the world on food. Central planning created a food surplus in the US with no equal in history. [1] > Central planning of housing created those lovely soviet style "housing" block developments while the beautiful inner cities of eastern europe rotted away. Central planning of housing in Singapore, the HDB, single-handedly changed the landscape of Singapore. 81% of Singaporeans live in HDB flats to this day. It is widely regarded as an overwhelming success. It transformed the city-state from, basically, slums to a modern metropolis in a few short decades. [2] > Central planning of car production gave you cars like the Trabant which you literally had to queue 18 years for. On the other hand, central planning gave Europe rail travel, while the same central planning of transit in America gave us traffic jams and the highest road mortality rate in any developed country. For every example you have, I can find a counter-example. I don't even believe in half of these things but it's obvious that this discussion is far from black and white as you made it out to be. [edit] And since we're on the topic of money, decentralized currency issuance in 1800s gave us wildcat banks that went under and took everyone's value with them. [3] You get what you put in, and it's easy to ignore the successes while focusing solely on the failures. Any system, centralized or decentralized, can fail spectacularly and history is littered with examples of massive successes and massive failures of both. [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/this-map-shows-how-mu... [2] https://thefield.asla.org/2018/09/06/from-slums-to-sky-garde... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking |
Yes, well now we have crypto currencies to take care of this function.