Planning In the Supposedly Free market

SUPPOSE THE COMPANY YOU WORK FOR hires a new CEO, who introduces herself to the manangers, workers, and shareholders, and explains her business philosophy clearly. "I am a firm believer in free enterprise and free markets", she proudly proclaims. "the free market is the best producer of wealth ever devised, or "discovered", and any interference in it from government or meddlesome corporate executives only slows economic growth. Business enterprises should respond to the market and work within it, rather than try to control it, and should remain flexible in their responses to market conditions. Therefore, all comprehensive advanced planning and fixed strategy is a detriment to growth, and is not only usless, but harmful to our purposes. As long as I am leading this company, we'll take it one day at a time, work hard, see what happens, and do the best we can in accordance to whatever market conditions prevail on any given day." ----- How do you suppose the managers and shareholders would respond to this? The new Chief Executive Officer would be looking for a new job later that same day, that's how. She would be run out of the board room for lacking, in the articulate words of one of the President Bushes, "that vision thing". Board members and shareholders alike would accuse the poor gal of being incompetent, of having no leadership skills, of being, as we like to say, "clueless". She would quickly be replaced by someone with a dynamic personality and an equally dynamic corporate business plan. Someone able to say: "this is where we are now, and this is where we want to be in the future. And here's exactly how I intnd to get us there." Then, the new top dog would lay out a comprehensive detailed plan which would make pre planned communist economies look haphazard and chaotic by comparison, just as all corporate CEOs are expected to do. Yes, when the chips are down and the money is on the line, people want a "man (or woman) with a plan." None of this "the market will take care of itself" nonsense. Despite all the rhetoric we hear about the glory and the wisdom of the laissez faire free enterprise free market, people always want to plan ahead; they want a vision for the future. The so called "free market" has never existed, and it never will, not in any economic system or enterprise. The free market is nothing but an ideal, an abstraction, a concept. Planning and cooperation is an essential component of all political and economic systems, be they communist, capitalist, socialist, autocracy, plutocracy, or democracy. Only anarchy is unplanned, and economic anarchy is exactly what a truly "free market" economy would truly be, if ever one existed, which one never will, as indicated above. Indeed, planning and cooperation is an essential component of all human endeavor which involves more than one person, or, for that matter, one person. And planning and ooperation, economically, are the fundamental ingredients of, - dare we say it - socialism. shhh!