PLANNING AND PLANISM. - There is economic planning when, in a nation, the functions of economic life are, for particular needs, programmed and controlled by the State in order to achieve, by determinate means and within a certain number of years, a situation held to be unattainable if economic life were left to the free initiative of producers. Plannism is the system of proceeding by successive plans for the economic development of a country. The aim is always to obtain a concentration of efforts in the desired direction, eliminating obstacles and resistances. It is therefore obvious that the execution of an "economic plan" implies a positive action of government, in varying measure strengthened by privileges and favors for certain industrial activities or public works, and by restrictive or coercive laws of an exceptional character.
If it were permissible, on the subject of planning, to speak once more of economic doctrines, one would have to recognize in plannism an intermediate position (for some it would be a "third way") between economic liberalism and collectivist economy: closer to the latter than to the former, destined fatally to accentuate, from plan to plan, the characteristics of an economy controlled by the State or exercised by it as one of its direct functions. Others think that a "third way" should not be sought in the interval between the two typical forms of economic regime, but outside that interval, and precisely beyond the liberalist form: whose errors it should correct and whose deficiencies it should fill by creating, through an applied economics, the contractual instruments suitable for realizing the postulates of free competition and of free initiative (v. HALLESISMO). Plannism is not an economic doctrine in the scientific sense of the word, being an expression of empiricism and a corrective for diseased economies: its application could not therefore be perpetuated without gravely compromising the natural economic equilibrium of a nation and its capacities for recovery. It may be debated whether, and to what extent, it is effective and can constitute the sole anchor of salvation for an isolated economy in an era of economic confusion: but anyone who saw in it a new form of economy and attributed to it characteristics of universality and a certain and lasting efficacy would be making a grave error.
"Economic plans," in fact, being tied to the contingency and the fortune of a regime, a policy or a government, cannot be other than national: that is, independent one from another and from the general economic situation, uncoordinated, and very difficult to coordinate in a world plan, the only logical one and one not directed against anyone. Destined instead to clash one with another, national plans go on creating mutual embarrassments, suspicions and threats, deepening the most deplorable divisions of the substantial economic unity of the world. In the present state of subordination of economics to politics, a "world plan" presupposes a prior political solidarity, difficult to imagine and to realize.
As the attempts inaugurated by the Marshall Plan (E.R.P.) and its developments demonstrate, a true systematic and permanent planning of the world economy cannot but relocate free initiative, guided and sustained not by political forces, but by economic criteria of a scientific and practical nature. The task is to create clear evidence of what the greater social utility of investments is: and to bring about the favorable circumstances, the instruments and the institutions that make this possible with a minimum of uncertainties and risks.
Private initiative is truly diseased, and this drives it to replace the sound moral and technical criterion with approximations and imitations, adventures and trickery. But the errors of free initiative have a relatively limited scope, often offset one another, and their lesson is always heeded out of self-interest. In plannism, on the other hand, and all the more the more completely it succeeds in making the economy a political function, the probability of erring is perhaps smaller, but the errors are undoubtedly far more serious, often irreparable, never compensable: and the lesson of facts rarely serves as experience, given that "economic plans" almost always engage the prestige of a regime and of an ideology.
The rational remedy for the defects of free initiative can consist only in educating it on the moral side, and in equipping it on the economic side, freeing labor from the enormous difficulties, burdens and uncertainties that today hamper it.