Quotessence
Home / Topics / Central Planning Quotes

Central Planning Quotes

Browse 41 quotes about Central Planning.

Central Planning Quotes

“Given a choice between patterns of subsistence that are relatively unfavorable to the cultivator but which yield a greater return in manpower or grain to the state and those patterns that benefit the cultivator but deprive the state, the ruler will choose the former every time. The ruler, then, maximizes the state-accessible product, if necessary, at the expense of the overall wealth of the realm and its subjects.”

EconomicsTaxationFree MarketCentralizationCentral Planning
Book:The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia
Create image

“Or, to express it differently, planning and competition can be combined only by planning for competition but not by planning against competition. It is of the utmost importance to the argument of this book for the reader to keep in mind that the planning against which all our criticism is directed is solely the planning against competition — the planning which is to be substituted for competition. This is the more important, as we cannot, within the scope of this book, enter into a discussion of the very necessary planning which is required to make competition as effective and beneficial as possible. But as in current usage "planning" has become almost synonymous with the former kind of planning, it will sometimes be inevitable for the sake of brevity to refer to it simply as planning, even though this means leaving to our opponents a very good word meriting a better fate.”

CompetitionLiberalismCentralizationCentral PlanningPlanned Economy
Book:The Road to Serfdom
Create image

“The answer to this question is closely connected with that other question which arises here, that of who is to do the planning. It is about this question that all the dispute about “economic planning” centers. This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals. Planning in the specific sense in which the term is used in contemporary controversy necessarily means central planning—direction of the whole economic system according to one unified plan. Competition, on the other hand, means decentralized planning by many separate persons. The halfway house between the two, about which many people talk but which few like when they see it, is the delegation of planning to organized industries, or, in other words, monopoly.”

EconomicsFree MarketMonopolyCentral Planning
Book:The Use of Knowledge in Society
Create image

“[...]those more likely to be at the disposal of particular individuals and those which we should with greater confidence expect to find in the possession of an authority made up of suitably chosen experts. If it is today so widely assumed that the latter will be in a better position, this is because one kind of knowledge, namely, scientific knowledge, occupies now so prominent a place in public imagination that we tend to forget that it is not the only kind that is relevant. It may be admitted that, as far as scientific knowledge is concerned, a body of suitably chosen experts may be in the best position to command all the best knowledge available—though this is of course merely shifting the difficulty to the problem of selecting the experts. What I wish to point out is that, even assuming that this problem can be readily solved, it is only a small part of the wider problem.”

ScienceKnowledgeCentral PlanningCult Of ExpertCult Of Scientific Knowledge
Book:The Use of Knowledge in Society
Create image

“The Federal Reserve System had been established to prevent what actually happened. It was set up to avoid a situation in which you would have to close down banks, in which you would have a banking crisis. And yet, under the Federal Reserve system, you had the worst banking crisis in the history of the United States”

EconomyRegulationCentral Planning
Book:The Indispensable Milton Friedman: Essays on Politics and Economics
Create image

“Fundamentalist religion is the most pervasive vision of central planning, though many fundamentalists may oppose human central planning as a usurpation or "playing God.This is consistent with the fundamentalist vision of an unconstrained God and a highly constrained man.”

MenHumansMayVisionSocietyPlanningConsistentFundamentalistUsurpationCentral PlanningPlaying GodFundamentalist Religion
Book:A Conflict of Visions: Idealogical Origins of Political Struggles
Create image

“The effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go; with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.”

PeopleIfsWantMayEndsTogetherResultsGroupsJourneyEffectsPlanningCommitCentral PlanningJourney Together
Author:Friedrich August von Hayek
Create image

“Central banks have gotten out of the central banking business and into the central planning business, meaning that they are devoted to raising up-if they can-economic growth and employment through the dubious means of suppressing interest rates and printing money. The nice thing about gold is that you can't print it.”

IfsMeanGrowthInterestMoneyNiceEconomicGoldRatePlanningEmploymentPrintDevotedBankingEconomic GrowthPrintingNice ThingsInterest RateCentral BanksDubiousSuppressingCentral BankingCentral PlanningPrinting Money
Author:James Grant
Create image

“If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism, and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.”

IfsPersonsDoeEarthPoliticalBeliefLeftSocialEconomicPercentNotionActivismPlanningAmbitiousEngineeringJudicialKnowledgeableSocial EngineeringCentral PlanningJudicial ActivismKnowledgeable Person
Author:Thomas Sowell
Create image

“If the central contest of the twentieth century has pitted capitalism against socialism, then F. A. Hayek has been its central figure. He helped us to understand why capitalism won by a knockout. It was Hayek who elaborated the basic argument demonstrating that central planning was nothing else but an impoverishing fantasy.”

IfsHas BeensFantasyCenturyFiguresCapitalismArgumentPlanningSocialismContestsTwentieth CenturyDemonstratingHayekCentral PlanningKnockouts
Author:Kenneth Minogue
Create image

“The objective, clearly enunciated by the leaders of UNCED, is to bring about a change in the present system of independent nations. The future is to be World Government with central planning by the United Nations. Fear of environmental crises - whether real or not - is expected to lead to - compliance”

WorldRealGovernmentNationsUnitedLeaderIndependentCrisisEnvironmentalClimate ChangeExpectedPlanningObjectivesGlobal WarmingUnited NationsWorld GovernmentComplianceCentral PlanningEnvironmental Crisis
Author:Dixie Lee Ray
Create image