What kinds of transitional demands could such forces make to hasten future socialization? There are relatively small, but meaningful, steps such as creating a public payments system—to ensure that every time you tap your credit or debit card, it is not a private company getting a cut and setting the terms—or a public credit rating agency—to displace the likes of Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s, which play a key role in determining how investment is distributed among competing projects, most recently helping divert a sizeable chunk of it into junk mortgages that nearly crashed the world economy. Then there are bigger public sector projects, like a massive increase in public housing construction—which places land into common ownership, takes housing off the market and ends its role as an investment asset—and its corollary, expanded public pensions. As for those who hold financial power themselves, what better way to disempower them than directly, through proposals to tax away large concentrations of wealth or diminish the role of shareholders and the stock market over the corporate sector—ultimately empowering the workers that produce the goods and services, and the communities that use them. All of these reforms serve to make planning explicit and public, rather than hidden and private as it is today. To quote J. W. Mason once more,

A society that truly subjected itself to the logic of market exchange would tear itself to pieces, but the conscious planning that confines market outcomes within tolerable bounds has to be hidden from view because if the role of planning was acknowledged, it would undermine the idea of markets as natural and spontaneous and demonstrate the possibility of conscious planning toward other ends.

The question is not whether the economy will be planned as a whole, or not at all. Instead, it is whether the present money managers will continue as the capitalist planners of the twenty-first century, or whether we ordinary people will start to remake our economic institutions, introduce democracy into their hearts, and bring the planning that already exists out into the open.