Democrats argue strongly that there is much to be gained from an
attempt to politicize the goals of economic planning and that such
combination is not just unavoidable but also highly desirable. Economic
theory alone has no claims to set goals for society or government and
the goals should reflect the public's preferences and indeed the Town
Plan is in itself a politicized document.
Using the editorial's term it already poisons economic environment
because the political process is used to impose central direction by a
central planning body in order to restrict and redirect free economic
activity of free individuals. Perhaps the editor is not against such
politicizing. It rather seems that it is afraid that the residents,
feeling the weight of the growing government intervention in economic
life, may now use political process to undo the trend. The editor thus
seems to request: Stay away.
The editorial uses appealing slogans like collective vision in order to
muster the public support for the new process. The fashionable term
"collective vision" owes its appeal to the ambiguity, its precise
meaning is not known, and people happily assume that they will get
there without knowing where they will be delivered. It is therefore
essential that residents discuss the precise meaning of the term
collective vision in order to see its consequences.
A collective plan means the sort of planning which is necessary to
realize distributive ends. It is not a plan to design the permanent
framework under which economic activities should be freely conducted by
different people in Waitsfield according to their individual plans.
What collective planners demand is a central direction of economic
activity according to a single plan, laying down how the resources of
individuals must be consciously directed to serve a particular ends in
a definite way.
It is nothing new. The similar gradual process of collectivization took
place in Germany a century ago where initially the term socialism was
masked under the appealing name organization or collective planning. We
are perhaps unaware that the same methods were discussed and used by
German socialists, and then by the Soviet socialists, long ago. The
collective way of running economic affairs misused resources in order
to produce a mediocre output. But the authorities continued restricting
the free activities with arbitrary and coercive intervention which
prevented the spoilers from poisoning the process.
The statue requires that the Town Plan be updated every five years and
one can only guess if the town will add new programs and try to
increase taxes. It already has the authority to lower the taxes without
the opinion gathering. The widespread opinion of the residents is well
known. The letters to the editor often explicitly demand lower taxes
and less municipal intrusion into the economic affairs of the town.
The residents may decide on further expansion of the town's activities
or they may not. Yet, the separation of politics from the planning
process is not possible. In fact political discussion is highly
desirable so we can "get there."
Matthew Jarosinski lives in Waitsfield.
