Daily Inspiration Quote by George Reisman

A lot of anti-capitalist rhetoric depends on a neat contrast: capitalism is “chaos,” socialism is “planning.” Reisman snaps that binary in half. The line is deceptively plain, almost accountant-dry, but it’s a polemical move with teeth: it rebrands the everyday decisions of ordinary people as the very thing central planners claim to monopolize. Budgeting a paycheck, choosing a job, stocking a store, pricing a service, saving for a mortgage - these aren’t random acts. They are forecasts, tradeoffs, and risk management. Planning, in other words, is already happening; it’s just distributed.

The subtext is a defense of capitalism as a cognitive system, not merely a moral or technical one. Reisman is implying that markets are networks of innumerable micro-plans that get tested against reality through profit and loss. That “test” matters: it’s how planning becomes accountable. A government plan can be politically protected long after it fails; an individual plan faces quicker feedback, because scarcity doesn’t negotiate.

Contextually, Reisman writes in the postwar tradition of Austrian-influenced economics (the shadow of Hayek and Mises is hard to miss), where the key problem isn’t goodwill but information. No committee can know what millions of people know about their own needs and circumstances. By calling individual choice “economic planning,” Reisman is also making a cultural argument: capitalism isn’t the absence of coordination; it’s coordination without a single coordinator. The provocation is aimed at anyone who hears “planning” and automatically imagines virtue.