PRC: publicly announces new Five Year Plan

Western newspapers: What Is China Planning? Experts Are Baffled

…five years later…

PRC: completes Five Year Plan

Western newspapers: The opacity of its system enables the country to routinely shock the rest of the world

  • DamarcusArt
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    1 year ago

    Oh absolutely. I was just doing the funny sound bite.

    It’s not that capitalists can’t think about future planning, but rather, the system does not allow them to. If their competitor were to make more profit than them in the short term, they could run them out of business and no amount of long term planning would matter then. It’s a society-wide prisoner’s dilemma, where every capitalist is forced to be amoral, forced to focus solely on profit, because they are out competed if they choose not to do those things.

    The libertarian types are hilarious though. Their obsession with the “profit motive” ignores the fact that…most things aren’t invented for profit, they are just patented and monopolized for profit. (Though these are the same people who seem to think that government regulation of business causes monopolies somehow, so I have no idea what their train of thought really is.)