Planning and Coordination

Abstract

Let me begin by summarising the thesis from which Devons set out. War, he pointed out, is a great centraliser. It is the government that conducts the war, decides what strategy to follow, and determines how the country’s resources can best be used if the war is to be won. For this purpose it assumes in total war all necessary powers, taking control over the entire economy and acting as ‘the sole consumer of the products of the economic system’, even to deciding what should be left for civilian consumption. Civilians are regarded as instruments for carrying on the war rather than as ‘individual persons with separate and different objectives of their own’. A war economy is thus in complete antithesis to a decentralised, consumer-driven, peacetime economy in which market forces, expressing the myriad preferences of individual producers and consumers, dominate the pattern of production and consumption, with the government intervening here and there.