> The structure works the way all centrally planned structures work: it increases and centralizes power while the attempted (expected) results do not materialize
I find it hard to take people seriously when they mention their ridiculous biases right up front. Central planning has never achieved an expected result? There was never a successful corporation? Nor a military operation? Really?
If you're going to be an ideological shill, at least try to hide it a bit better.
Errm, actually (modern) militaries are highly decentralized. The corporal on the ground has a great deal of latitude and is expected to show initiative and creativity.
Contrast that with the highly centralized militaries of WW1 - the attempted result wasn't "get bogged down for 4 years while our troops are mass-slaughtered".
I think you've missed my point. The article writer made a ridiculously strong claim: that no centralized structure ever worked. Only a single counterexample is needed to show that this is a dodgy claim, but counterexamples to this aren't rare, they're abundant. In particular, any time the efficiency costs of centralization are less than the transaction costs of decentralized parts cooperating, centralization is a win. There's a reason we've evolved brains.
Coming up with examples where decentralization beat centralization, on the other hand, proves nothing.
I find it hard to take people seriously when they mention their ridiculous biases right up front.
Why is this? Most people, myself included, have at least a few "ridiculous biases" in their heads. I find it much easier to take an argument seriously when the biases are obvious. I may quickly decide that the argument is wrong, but at least I can make that decision.
Someone as far out into the ideological fringe as this article is going to be making a skewed argument no matter what. Would you really prefer that they did it in such a way that you never noticed the bias?
Well, there's ridiculous biases, and then there's ridiculous biases.
It's a matter of degree. Economics is a discipline which is all too susceptible to story-telling. Given a bias, almost any situation can be argued one way or the other by telling the appropriate story, and emphasising and underemphasising the various elements. So overt bias tends to lead me to suspect any given tale of economics likely has relatively little information and won't sound nearly as decisive if the sources are investigated. Making this decision to discount on the basis of evidence of bias is much cheaper than actually investigating the sources, of course; instead, I'll reserve such investigation for those stories which seem interesting but don't have obvious bias.
And in this case, the bias is extremely blatant and very silly. The author has stated right up front that there is only one way they could possibly tell the story they're going to tell, it can only end up one way, and they have no motivation to look for counterexamples.
In fact, the story may have some truth, may be a lot of truth, but the bias and the ease of manipulative storytelling in the discipline tell me that it's not worth my time investigating deeper. FWIW, I object to moralistic, almost religious, edicts to recycle. I'd much rather pay someone else to handle that problem. So I'm even on the side of the author's end goal; but I have no respect for the author's tale.
I find it hard to take people seriously when they mention their ridiculous biases right up front. Central planning has never achieved an expected result? There was never a successful corporation? Nor a military operation? Really?
If you're going to be an ideological shill, at least try to hide it a bit better.