Imagine a slightly different history where the Fabians actually won. Those early years Fabians, Wells, Shaw, the Webbs, their belief in the efficiency of proper scientific socialism and planning. We’d have had GOSBRIT to sort things out for us. Then add in a bit of real history:
Ukraine and Russia are major suppliers of sunflower oil and the invasion caused serious shortages. Many shoppers and manufacturers started buying vegetable oils in the place of sunflower oil, creating a domino effect of price rises.
“[The war] had a huge impact on sunflower and the wider vegetable oils market, pushing up prices in alternative vegetable oils such as rapeseed and soybean,” says Gary Lewis, chief executive of KTC Edibles and president of the National Edible Oil Distributors Association (NEODA).
As economists like to point out everything is both substitutable and also, by that definition, itself a substitute. So a sudden shortage of sunflower oil has those knock on effects upon soy and rape. But also upon olive oil. And, well, butter (in French cooking perhaps) and lard (in British) can also be such substitutes. Some will look at the price of any of those and have mash instead of chips, or baked. Or even substitute away from potatoes entirely to rice or quinoa. Or - well, it’s complex, isn’t it?
So, how does GOSBRIT deal with this? We can’t use prices because we’ve already decided to use planning. How is the calculation done of what to produce now that there’s that sunflower lack? Then comes the problem of actually communicating that change in production to the producers - then the further and more difficult step of informing the consumers of what they should be using.
Well, yes, it doesn’t really work, does it? Precisely because everything, but everything, is a substitute we’ve got the one change in one part of the economy and the entire national plan has to be changed. In real time. It’s not even our economy, our plan, that has changed to require the recalculation.
Now consider that part of the economy where the Fabians did actually win - health care. The NHS is run by GOSBRIT without the use of prices or markets, but by bureaucratic dictat according to the plan.
Yes, yes, we’re quite prepared to agree that health care is more important than sunflower oil. But that’s precisely why we shouldn’t be using scientific planning there, isn’t it?