Purposive
The need for 'purposive planning' has never been far from H. Wilson's lips during the election cam- paign. But it's been a cliché rather than a con- sidered argument. To discover what Wilson really believes to be the case for Socialist planning I've had to go back to a speech he made last year to the Economic Club of New York, where I found the following:
In an economy as large as that of the United States it may be enough to leave this [the creation of an efficient economy] mainly to market forces, but in a smaller economy there is a place for co-operation as well as competition. . . . There is also a place for making quite sure the market economy does in practice the job . . . of shifting resources from inefficient and backward units to efficient and advanced units. It may well do this in the long run, but we can't always afford to wait for the long run.
So the reason we need Socialism is that our economy is too small for laissez-faire. From which I conclude that if, by good fortune, we suc- ceed in joining the Common Market, and thereby become part of an even larger economy than that of the United States, the case for Socialist plan- ning disappears. If this is what H. Wilson believes, would he please say so—and I shall be the first to applaud? Or was all this just a lot of eyewash designed specially for American consumption? In which case, what does he believe? Anything?
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