Objections and answers

Without prices, you cannot calculate

The oldest objection, made by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 and developed by Friedrich Hayek in 1945. A market price is a compressed signal that conveys information no single participant holds in full: how scarce a thing is, how badly it is wanted, what it cost to make. Abolish prices and you abolish the signal, and no planning office can reassemble it, because the knowledge is dispersed among millions of people and much of it cannot be written down.

The Constitution's reply is that the signal is not reassembled centrally but collected at source. Article 63 lets every resident register what they need and binds the planners to the result. Articles 92 and 93 require every workplace and every body of users to state publicly what they need and what they can do. Article 97 then runs at least three rounds of negotiation in which each level reconciles what it can and passes upward only what it cannot, with every balance, deficit and rejected variant published.

Oskar Lange and Abba Lerner argued in the 1930s that a planner could iterate toward the right answer, and Hayek's reply was that iteration is too slow for a world that changes underneath it. The Republic's honest position is that its own answer has been tested at the scale of eighteen million people and one language, and nowhere else.

Unconditional provision destroys the incentive to work

If food, housing, healthcare and energy arrive whatever you do, why do anything? Article 62 makes provision unconditional and Article 70(4) forbids any sanction for failing to contribute.

Article 70(2) counts as contribution the things people actually do: care at home, study, restoration work, service on councils and juries, art and research. Article 115 makes unpopular work attract people by improving it, cutting its hours below the general ceiling and expanding its training, with no threat to anyone. And Article 85 gives every worker a vote in the enterprise they work in, which is a different relationship to a job than turning up for a wage.

Fluid's contribution rate is high and has been since the 1974 reform. Whether that survives a generation that has never known anything else is not something the Republic can currently answer.

Enterprises that cannot fail behave badly

János Kornai's account of the soft budget constraint is an empirical critique of planned economies that does not depend on ideology. A firm certain of rescue hoards labour, underinvests, and absorbs resources others need. Kornai's Economics of Shortage argued in 1980 that shortage in such systems is systemic.

The Constitution takes this seriously and answers it with a published horizon. Article 100 gives every enterprise a binding resource ceiling and public physical accounts. Article 101 has its federation review it yearly in public. Article 102 permits support, and caps it: two years, renewable once for one more, capped as a share of the branch, with the deciders named, and expiry without results opening reorganisation by operation of law. Article 104 then protects the people while reorganising the enterprise, so the constraint bites on the institution and never on the household.

The concession: the cap in Article 102(4) sits in organic law, and organic law can be loosened by three fifths of the chamber.

Planning becomes bureaucracy, and bureaucracy becomes rule

The Republic has already done this once. See the Directorate.

The answers are procedural and were written by people who lived through it. Article 90(4) publishes the plan and its variants. Article 96(4) leaves the Secretariat computing and deciding nothing. Article 143(9)(b) lets any resident, cooperative or commune sue on the ground that the participation the Constitution requires did not take place, and Article 143(10) lets the court order the stage run again. Article 94(3) makes every delegate mandated and recallable at any time.

You have abolished choice

Article 110(3) limits the multiplication of models, and Article 112 puts resource-heavy goods into common holding, with personal allocation reserved to goods below the threshold. There will be fewer kinds of thing here than in a market economy, and some kinds of thing not at all.

The reply is that the Constitution trades variety for durability and time: Article 33 requires goods repairable by their user, Article 108 guarantees parts for ten years, and Article 22(3) sends every efficiency gain into sufficiency, restoration and shorter hours, leaving output within the ceiling. Article 106(2) makes the movement of goods into free provision a standing objective.

Whether that is a good trade is a value judgement.

This is not freedom

You may not start a business and employ people as Article 88(2) prohibits engaging the labour of anyone outside your household, and Article 6(4) prohibits enterprises operating for profit. That is a liberty other societies have and this one has removed.

The Constitution's reply is that it removed one liberty and secured others, and it says which. You may work alone or with your household at any craft without authorisation, under Article 88(1). Your dwelling, tools and possessions are yours under Article 74. Expression, assembly, association, belief and the press are protected under Articles 52 to 56, and Article 53(4) protects criticism of the plan and of the Constitution in full. Nine parties sit in the chamber and three of them want this order changed.

The Republic's claim is that the liberty it removed was the liberty to live from other people's labour, and that a many liberties are easier to exercise when housing, healthcare and food do not depend on holding a job.