Quotes & Sayings About Central Planning

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. — James Grant

All utopias are dystopias. The term "dystopia" was coined by fools that believed a "utopia" can be functional. — A.E. Samaan

Central planning, judicial activism, and the nanny state all presume vastly more knowledge than any elite have ever possessed. — Thomas Sowell

Central planning inevitably leads to economic chaos and failure.
Friedrich Hayek called the delusion that a single person or a group
of government planners could possibly possess the knowledge to plan
an entire economy a "fatal conceit." The overwhelming historical
evidence is that the more freedom a nation has, the more economic
opportunities will exist and the more dynamic that nation's economy
will be. Likewise, the more regulations, controls, taxes, governmentrun
industries, protectionism, and other forms of interventionism that
exists, the poorer the country will become. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals and, as such, essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

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. — Kenneth Minogue

A "centrally planned economy" by definition discourages and despises participation by the masses. It's a bureaucratic oligarchy. — A.E. Samaan

Facing the sagging middle when writing a novel, while inevitable, may be
overcome by pre-planning. I divide my collection of proposed scenes into three acts, each scene inciting tension that builds toward the final crisis in Act Three. If by Act Two the emotional river isn't spilling over the banks, I reassess the plot so that once the writing is flowing I don't slide into a dry creek. The central character should be struggling to navigate life well into the end of Act One, even if her fiercest antagonist is only from within. — Patricia Hickman

Brute force is not our salvation, especially as directed by State central planning and done with little regard for the innocents ... — Anthony Gregory

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. — Thomas Sowell

The difference between communism and socialism is that under socialism central planning ends with a gun in your face, whereas under communism central planning begins with a gun in your face. — Kevin D. Williamson

Government central planning means over-riding other people's plans. — Thomas Sowell

Are you really questioning the wisdom of central planning? Because the happy citizens of Cuba and North Korea beg to differ. — Jonathan Gruber

The whole tendency of modern life is towards scientific planning and organisation, central control, standardisation, and specialisation. If this tendency was left to work itself out to its extreme conclusion, one might expect to see the state transformed into an immense social machine, all the individual components of which are strictly limited to the performance of a definite and specialised function, where there could be no freedom because the machine could only work smoothly as long as every wheel and cog performed its task with unvarying regularity. Now the nearer modern society comes to the state of total organisation, the more difficult it is to find any place for spiritual freedom and personal responsibility. Education itself becomes an essential part of the machine, for the mind has to be as completely measured and controlled by the techniques of the scientific expert as the task which it is being trained to perform. — Christopher Henry Dawson

Centralization is an abomination! Decentralize everything! Leave nothing to the central planners. — A.E. Samaan

No central planning, no autocratic rule and no military regime can produce what free man can do. — Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj

The desire to engineer humanity is a sign of a mind warped by megalomania and lust for power. — A.E. Samaan

Nothing in recent history makes any sense without a deep understanding of WWII and The Holocaust. — A.E. Samaan

The Statist deflects public scorn for the consequences of his own central planning by blaming the very industry he is sabotaging for supply dislocations and price hikes. — Mark Levin

Defy the central planners. Upend their designs for your life. Be a staunch individualist. Stand on your rights. — A.E. Samaan

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. — Thomas Sowell

If it's not accepted that big government, fiat money, ignoring liberty, central economic planning, welfarism, and warfarism caused our crisis, we can expect a continuous and dangerous march toward corporatism and even fascism with even more loss of our liberties, — Ron Paul

Despite the well-deserved criticism, controlling public opinion became a central element in all future war planning. — Oliver Stone

My view ... would be that we are entering upon a new and interim society which is neither capitalist nor socialist, but in which we can achieve central planning without loss of individual initiative, by the mere process of absorbing initiative in the function of planning. — John Grierson

If the people are led to believe that scarce resources are best channeled in a direction that producers and consumers would not choose on their own, the result must necessarily be central planning. — Llewellyn Rockwell

With its fluctuating forms and needless decoration, fashion epitomizes the supposedly unproductive waste that inspired 20th-century technocrats to dream of central planning. It exists for no good reason. But that's practically a definition of art. — Virginia Postrel

Everything about the former colonial administrative offices made Holden sad. The drab, institutional green walls, the cluster of cubicles in the central workspace, the lack of windows or architectural flourishes. The Mormons had been planning to run the human race's first extrasolar colony from a place that would have been equally at home as an accounting office. It felt anticlimactic. Hello, welcome to your centuries-long voyage to build a human settlement around another star! Here's your cubicle. The space had been — James S.A. Corey

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. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

Among other objectives, liquidity guidelines must take into account the risks that inadequate liquidity planning by major financial firms pose for the broader financial system, and they must ensure that these firms do not become excessively reliant on liquidity support from the central bank. — Ben Bernanke

The fateful moment for the Chinese economy, crippled by central planning and collectivized production, was when Deng Xiaoping, China's long-term leader after Mao's death, announced that the country would pursue "Socialism with Chinese characteristics," which is to say a market economy under an authoritarian technocracy. This was in 1977, as good a year as any for marking the birth of modern China. Deng and his associates undertook a job akin to that of a political bomb squad, laboriously dismantling most of the economic ideology installed by Mao without blowing up political continuity at the same time. That they succeeded is in many ways the single most important political fact of contemporary China. — Clay Shirky

"This compound should be available from most good drugstores." I got increasingly annoyed with this phrase because in the world I lived in, even ordinary soap was available only intermittently ... In an economy that operated by central planning, shortages of just about everything were commonplace." the author dexcribing life in Hungary in the 1950s under Communist Russian rule. — Andrew S. Grove

food has played a central role not only in my professional but also in my emotional life, in all of my dealings with loved ones and most of all in my relationship to myself and my body. I am what feeds me. And how I feed myself at any given moment says a lot about what I'm going through or what I need. I don't believe I am alone. Yes, we eat for our stomachs, but we hunger with our hearts. Like most people and many women, I think about what to eat all the time. I am constantly plotting my next meal, planning how and what I will shop for, and ever hatching new plans to avoid the foods I know will undermine my well-being. Foods are like men: some are good, some are bad, and some are okay only in small doses. But most should be tried at least once. — Padma Lakshmi

Racists are everywhere, but historically speaking the real danger came from Progressives that desired the power of the state to engineer society upon a racial lines. — A.E. Samaan

A language is the joint historical creation of millions of speakers. Although all speakers have some effect on the trajectory of a language, the process is not particularly egalitarian. Linguists, grammarians, and educators, some of them backed by the power of the state, weigh in heavily. But the process is not particularly amenable to a dictatorship, either. Despite the efforts toward "central planning," language (especially its everyday spoken form) stubbornly tends to go on its own rich, multivalent, colorful way. — James C. Scott

I've read quite a few readers' reviews of my book on Amazon, saying, 'Ah, he criticises the free market, he advocates central planning.' I don't do that for a minute! But this is our black and white, dichotomous way of thinking - which has really been harmful. — Ha-Joon Chang

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 — Dixie Lee Ray

Capitalism does millions of things better than the alternatives. It balances supply and demand in an elegant way that central planning has never come close to. — Jeremy Grantham

The right to "liberty" and "pursuit" of happiness is incompatible with a government that makes choices for you. — A.E. Samaan

Legislating morality grows big government immensely, and helps fashion the noose the government will use to ultimately hang you by. — A.E. Samaan

The free market is not only a more efficient decision maker than even the wisest central planning body, but even more important, the free market keeps economic power widely dispersed. — Milton Friedman

Central planning doesn't work. A little bit of it is a drag. A lot is fatal. — Bill Bonner

Medicare is a monopoly: a central-planning bureaucracy grafted onto American health care. It exercises a stranglehold on the health care of all Americans over 65, and on the medical practices of almost all physicians. Medicare decides what is legitimate and what is not: which prices may be charged and which services may be rendered. — Virginia Postrel

Typically, when there are corporate habits that undermine individuals, it has emerged without any sort of central planning. Nobody sits down and says, 'I'm going to create an evil habit for this corporation.' — Charles Duhigg

In this sense socialism means the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of "planned economy" in which the entrepreneur working for profit is replaced by a central planning body. — Friedrich Hayek

Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the "invisible hand" of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. — Daron Acemoglu

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. — James C. Scott

By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed role from useful tool to brainless tyrant. This legal regime will never be up to the job, any more than the Soviet system of central planning was, because ti can't think. The comedy of law's sterile logic
large POISON signs warning against common sand, spending twenty-two years on pesticide review and deciding next to nothing, allowing fifty-year-old white men to sue for discrimination
is all too reminiscent of the old jokes we used to hear about life in the Eastern bloc.
Judgement is to law as water is to crops. It should not be surprising that law has become brittle, and society along with it. — Philip K. Howard

Central planning didn't work for Stalin or Mao, and it won't work for an entrepreneur either. — Michael Bloomberg

Central banking has become the new central planning. Under the old central planning, government attempted to manage production and the supply of goods and services. Under the new central planning, the Fed attempts to manage the financial system and the supply and allocation of credit. — Anonymous

Let me say that I think the economic history of the last 150 years clearly shows that if you want to industrialize a country in a short period, let us say 20 years, and you don't have a well-developed private sector, entrepreneurial class, then central planning is important. — Manmohan Singh

The Obama administration's agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of "economic planning" and "social justice" that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail. The administration's central activity - the political allocation of wealth and opportunity - is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption. — George Will

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 — Alan Ebenstein