At 12:41 PM 3/31/97 -0800, Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote: >To Paul Altesman: > Would you please give us even one reference where >anybody has ever declared the soft budget constraint to be >a problem for socialist planning in general as opposed to >some sort of market socialism without command planning? Sure. And rather than suggest you re-read my post of 3/27 which gave references (my last post complained that you weren't reading your interlocutors, did you miss it?) I will offer a new one - the Cambridge piece-de-resistance on Soviet matters "Economic Thought and Economic Reform in the Soviet Union" by Pekka Sutela. > Traditionally, centrally planned command socialist >economies, such as the USSR, did balance their budgets at >the center and imposed that balance on the firms as well. > But, as long as there is command planning, the central >planners do have the ability, if they desire to exercise >it, to control the budget of the enterprise. This >disappears under indicative planning. The point is not just that the litterature references contradict you. Anyone with actual experience in the system would. Life inside,for example, the Soviet economic world was well... like life. The big firms were "too big, to fail" and knew it. They were also covered by powerful sectoral ministries who protected "their" enterprises at all costs. When it came to actual opperations (so-called plan implementation) Gosplan people dealt with aggregated numbers that had been heavily worked over, and ex-post. I think its almost a matter of common sense - interests and struggle don't end because a 5 year plan was published. I will try to move to the Yugo and China issues in a later, separate context.
