Planning in the specific sense in which the term is used in contemporary controversy necessarily means central planning — direction of the whole economic system according to one unified plan. Competition, on the other hand, means decentralized planning by many separate persons. The half-way house between the two, about which many people talk but which few like when they see it, is the delegation of planning to organized industries, or, in other words, monopoly.
F.A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” 35 American Economic Review 519 (September 1945), included as Chapter V in Individualism and Economic Order (1948).
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F.A. Hayek
