PLANNING and PLANNISM. — Planning exists in the economic sphere when, in a nation, the functions of economic life are, for particular reasons, programmed and controlled by the State with the aim of achieving, by specified means and within a certain number of years, a situation deemed unattainable if economic life were left to the free initiative of producers. Plannism is the system of proceeding through successive plans for the economic development of a country. Its purpose is always to obtain a concentration of efforts in the desired direction, eliminating obstacles and resistance. It is therefore obvious that the execution of an “economic plan” entails positive government action, reinforced to varying degrees by privileges and favors for certain industrial activities or public works, and by restrictive or coercive laws of an exceptional nature.
If it were still permissible to speak of economic doctrines in connection with planning, plannism would have to be recognized as occupying an intermediate position (for some, it would constitute a “third way”) between economic liberalism and collectivist economy: closer to the latter than to the former, and destined inevitably to accentuate, from plan to plan, the characteristics of an economy controlled by the State or operated 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, specifically beyond the liberal form, whose errors it should correct and deficiencies remedy by creating, through an applied economy, the contractual instruments suited to realizing the postulates of free competition and
free initiative (v. HALLESISMO). Plannism is not an economic doctrine in the scientific sense of the word, since it is an expression of empiricism and a corrective for diseased economies; its application therefore could not be perpetuated without seriously compromising the natural economic equilibrium of a nation and its capacity for recovery. It may be debated whether, and to what extent, it is effective and can constitute the sole lifeline for an economy isolated in an age of economic disarray; but anyone who saw in it a new form of economy and attributed to it universal characteristics and a certain and lasting efficacy would be committing a grave error.
“Economic plans,” in fact, being tied to the contingencies and fortunes of a regime, a policy, or a government, can only be national: that is, independent of one another and of the general economic situation, uncoordinated, and very difficult to coordinate in a world plan, the only logical plan and one directed against no one. Instead, being destined to conflict with one another, national plans create mutual difficulties, suspicions, and threats, deepening the most deplorable divisions within the world’s essential economic unity. In the present state of the subordination of the economy to politics, a “world plan” presupposes a prior political solidarity, difficult to imagine and achieve.
As the efforts inaugurated by the Marshall Plan (E.R.P.) and its developments demonstrate, a true systematic and permanent planning of the world economy can only culminate in free initiative, guided and supported not by political forces but by economic criteria of a scientific and practical nature. The task is to make evident where the greatest social utility of investments lies, and to establish the favorable circumstances, instruments, and institutions that make this possible with a minimum of uncertainty and risk.
Private initiative is genuinely sick, and this drives it to replace sound moral and technical judgment with approximations and imitations, ventures and deceptions. But the errors of free initiative have a relatively limited scope; they often offset one another, and their lesson is always heeded for the sake of gain. In plannism, on the other hand, and all the more so the more completely it succeeds in making the economy a political function, the probability of error may be lower, but the errors are undoubtedly far more serious, often irreparable, and never compensable; and the lesson of events rarely proves useful as experience, since the prestige of a regime and an ideology is almost always committed to “economic plans.”
The rational remedy for the defects of free initiative can consist only in educating it morally and equipping it economically, freeing labor from the enormous difficulties, burdens, and uncertainties that today hamper II.