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What about Walmart? Are corporations not their own little centrally planned economies? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38914131-the-people-s-republic-of-wal

What about Walmart? Are corporations not their own little centrally planned economies? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38914131-the-people-s-republic-of-walmart https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38914131-the-people-s-re...

readthenotes1 3y ago
What about Kmart? Are corporations not their own little centrally planned economies? Or take the something like 90% of restaurants that fail within the first year. Are they not..? You got to talk about the bath water if you want to talk about the baby
- striking 3y ago
  Capitalist countries fail too. We just had a banking crisis resolved by centralized action. I'm not sure what this means aside from the fact that any poorly managed system fails.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Walmart is literally a market. No one is forcing you to buy things at walmart or work at walmart. No one is telling you which goods you will get and in what quantity. Substituting in the face of scarcity is encouraged on the micro scale. The power of markets is allowing individual consumers to change their consumption habits in the face of scarcity/abundance.
- cced 3y ago
  Absolute rubbish take. > No one is forcing you to buy things at Walmart When Walmart comes into a small town and uses it’s economies of scale to force smaller stores to shut down because they have the ability to operate at a loss, is this choice? Walmart has a board of executives that decide on the direction of the company, it’s a corporation the performs central planning in order to maximize profits.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    Yes, the townspeople are choosing to shop at the market that has the best prices/best selection/whatever else walmart has that makes it preferable to other stores. Walmart's executives set their prices based on the cost to get products. Prices constantly change in reaction to supply and demand. You seem to have figured out though that markets don't work without competition. Luckily the grocery market, at least in most places, is robustly competitive. And the government should step in when that is not the case.
    - runarberg 3y ago
      Wallmart workers famously cannot even afford to pay Wallmart prices for their foods. How are townspeople (many of which are Wallmart workers) supposed to pay higher prices for their food when they can’t even afford the lowest price?
      - HDThoreaun 3y ago
        It's a market. If you don't like your job look for a better one. I mean I agree that our system isn't perfect, or even that good, but no system is. Planned economies consistently lead to famine and tens of millions of people starving to death. If the labor market is a monopsony, as it commonly is in small towns, the government should step in.
        runarberg 3y ago
        > Planned economies consistently lead to famine and tens of millions of people starving to death. They do not. Cuba has yet to experience a famine despite being under a severe embargo for several decades. Famines also happen under capitalism. There are multitude of famines in east Africa to choose from, death count is well over tens of millions. Outside of Africa, the Bengal famine happened under British rule, death count 1-4 million people. While socialism was gaining traction inside British isles at the time, their colonies kept being ruled by harsh free market advocates. However blaming capitalism for the Bengal famine is unfair, where imperialism, colonialism, and racism is a much better explanation, similarly, blaming communism for the Great Chinese Famine in Mao’s China is unfair, when fascism is a much better explanation. Famines aren’t the only man-made disaster out there. It is hard to blame anything but global capitalism for disaster such as the Bhopal disaster, where one of the largest cities in India was poisoned in a effort to maximize profits for shareholders. Thousands died. Together the disaster of capitalism cause several orders more deadly than the disaster commonly attributed to communism.
Philorandroid 3y ago
It might be "centrally planned" in the most technical sense, but it's a bit of a stretch to compare a government's leverage over a market by threat of force to a private entity planning what to do with the property it owns. How is it meaningfully distinct from an individual (or a family) doing financial planning around their assets?
jl6 3y ago
A tempting analogy, but I think there are too many crucial differences to put corporations forward as a model for central planning. For a start, corporations are very small compared to states. Even Walmart, the world's biggest employer, is less than 1% the size of the US by headcount. More problematic is that corporations plan to maximize profit. That's it. It's a comparatively trivial optimization goal compared to the multitude of ways of valuing things that exist in wider society - and yet, corporations still frequently fail to be profitable. OP's example about the wedding ring is a case in point. Walmart's Finance department would value that for its raw weight in gold only. But even more worrying, corporations have a magic tool for maintaining order and efficiency: firing people. States can't do that, or at least, not states that you'd want to live in. Corporations are rigidly hierarchical. Corporations are not democracies. Imagine human rights as implemented by the HR department. Scaling up corporate processes to manage a whole country would result in a terrifying dystopia.
- kneebonian 3y ago
  > firing people. States can't do that, The Gulags: Let me introduce myself.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > But even more worrying, corporations have a magic tool for maintaining order and efficiency: firing people. States can't do that, Deportation and capital punishment are real things, so I think your wrong.
  - hgomersall 3y ago
    They're not real things in a civilised society.
- photochemsyn 3y ago
  I think you just need to go up the corporate-financial ladder a step. Clearly the major shareholder conglomerates - Vanguard, Fidelity, State Street, Vanguard etc. can act in a manner very similar to a Soviet Central Committee to direct resources in a centrally planned manner. The current consolidation of banking into a small group of large corporate institutions (JPMorganChase, BankAmerica, Citgroup, WellsFargo) with direct ties to the Federal Reserve is another obvious example of how the US economy is more of a centrally planned model than not, and of course, the military-industrial corporate system, where the government is basically the sole buyer and distributor of contracts, is another one.
wrycoder 3y ago
What about Sears? What about Polariod? Packard? At the top of the growth sigmoid, corporations always make the wrong planning choices, to avoid self-cannibalization of existing products and to protect existing internal power structures. The same thing happens with centrally planned economies.

readthenotes1 3y ago

What about Kmart? Are corporations not their own little centrally planned economies? Or take the something like 90% of restaurants that fail within the first year. Are they not..? You got to talk about the bath water if you want to talk about the baby

striking 3y ago
Capitalist countries fail too. We just had a banking crisis resolved by centralized action. I'm not sure what this means aside from the fact that any poorly managed system fails.

HDThoreaun 3y ago

Walmart is literally a market. No one is forcing you to buy things at walmart or work at walmart. No one is telling you which goods you will get and in what quantity. Substituting in the face of scarcity is encouraged on the micro scale. The power of markets is allowing individual consumers to change their consumption habits in the face of scarcity/abundance.

cced 3y ago
Absolute rubbish take. > No one is forcing you to buy things at Walmart When Walmart comes into a small town and uses it’s economies of scale to force smaller stores to shut down because they have the ability to operate at a loss, is this choice? Walmart has a board of executives that decide on the direction of the company, it’s a corporation the performs central planning in order to maximize profits.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Yes, the townspeople are choosing to shop at the market that has the best prices/best selection/whatever else walmart has that makes it preferable to other stores. Walmart's executives set their prices based on the cost to get products. Prices constantly change in reaction to supply and demand. You seem to have figured out though that markets don't work without competition. Luckily the grocery market, at least in most places, is robustly competitive. And the government should step in when that is not the case.
  - runarberg 3y ago
    Wallmart workers famously cannot even afford to pay Wallmart prices for their foods. How are townspeople (many of which are Wallmart workers) supposed to pay higher prices for their food when they can’t even afford the lowest price?
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      It's a market. If you don't like your job look for a better one. I mean I agree that our system isn't perfect, or even that good, but no system is. Planned economies consistently lead to famine and tens of millions of people starving to death. If the labor market is a monopsony, as it commonly is in small towns, the government should step in.
      - runarberg 3y ago
        > Planned economies consistently lead to famine and tens of millions of people starving to death. They do not. Cuba has yet to experience a famine despite being under a severe embargo for several decades. Famines also happen under capitalism. There are multitude of famines in east Africa to choose from, death count is well over tens of millions. Outside of Africa, the Bengal famine happened under British rule, death count 1-4 million people. While socialism was gaining traction inside British isles at the time, their colonies kept being ruled by harsh free market advocates. However blaming capitalism for the Bengal famine is unfair, where imperialism, colonialism, and racism is a much better explanation, similarly, blaming communism for the Great Chinese Famine in Mao’s China is unfair, when fascism is a much better explanation. Famines aren’t the only man-made disaster out there. It is hard to blame anything but global capitalism for disaster such as the Bhopal disaster, where one of the largest cities in India was poisoned in a effort to maximize profits for shareholders. Thousands died. Together the disaster of capitalism cause several orders more deadly than the disaster commonly attributed to communism.

Philorandroid 3y ago

It might be "centrally planned" in the most technical sense, but it's a bit of a stretch to compare a government's leverage over a market by threat of force to a private entity planning what to do with the property it owns. How is it meaningfully distinct from an individual (or a family) doing financial planning around their assets?

jl6 3y ago

A tempting analogy, but I think there are too many crucial differences to put corporations forward as a model for central planning. For a start, corporations are very small compared to states. Even Walmart, the world's biggest employer, is less than 1% the size of the US by headcount. More problematic is that corporations plan to maximize profit. That's it. It's a comparatively trivial optimization goal compared to the multitude of ways of valuing things that exist in wider society - and yet, corporations still frequently fail to be profitable. OP's example about the wedding ring is a case in point. Walmart's Finance department would value that for its raw weight in gold only. But even more worrying, corporations have a magic tool for maintaining order and efficiency: firing people. States can't do that, or at least, not states that you'd want to live in. Corporations are rigidly hierarchical. Corporations are not democracies. Imagine human rights as implemented by the HR department. Scaling up corporate processes to manage a whole country would result in a terrifying dystopia.

kneebonian 3y ago
> firing people. States can't do that, The Gulags: Let me introduce myself.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dragonwriter 3y ago
> But even more worrying, corporations have a magic tool for maintaining order and efficiency: firing people. States can't do that, Deportation and capital punishment are real things, so I think your wrong.
- hgomersall 3y ago
  They're not real things in a civilised society.
photochemsyn 3y ago
I think you just need to go up the corporate-financial ladder a step. Clearly the major shareholder conglomerates - Vanguard, Fidelity, State Street, Vanguard etc. can act in a manner very similar to a Soviet Central Committee to direct resources in a centrally planned manner. The current consolidation of banking into a small group of large corporate institutions (JPMorganChase, BankAmerica, Citgroup, WellsFargo) with direct ties to the Federal Reserve is another obvious example of how the US economy is more of a centrally planned model than not, and of course, the military-industrial corporate system, where the government is basically the sole buyer and distributor of contracts, is another one.

wrycoder 3y ago

What about Sears? What about Polariod? Packard? At the top of the growth sigmoid, corporations always make the wrong planning choices, to avoid self-cannibalization of existing products and to protect existing internal power structures. The same thing happens with centrally planned economies.