The privileges of liberty and the sanctity of the individual went out and whipped butt.

Harry Wallop has a lovely piece about bananas. The point we’d lift from it being:

Keeping track of all the bananas comes down to barcodes on the outside of the boxes and a warehouse that operates, Hopkins says, with “relentless focus”. He deciphers the code on one box, which is destined for Iceland supermarket and has come from Colombia. “I can see that it was harvested on March 27 at 10am,” he says. “We have 3D warehouses, so I can tell which container, which ship it came in, who drove the forklift truck and which supermarket it will end up at.”

This is, of course, planning to the nth degree. Bananas crop 52 weeks a year, demand varies little. The entire system faces little variance in either supply or demand and the process is really just about the efficiency with which the transport can be arranged. Profit margins are tiny - 1 to 2% of turnover sorts of levels.

This is exactly what a planned economy should be good at - planned economic activity. That is the justification for the entire idea, that planning is more efficient than the chaos of mere markets.

But to offer a second PJ O’Rourke quote:

“For all the meddling the Communist bloc countries have done in banana republics, they still never seem to be able to get their hands on any actual bananas.”

Which gives us our lesson for the day. Planned economies aren’t even any good at planning. At which point the Hell with them really, there’s no other rational response, is there?