Socialism

I don't agree with the other person you're talking to, but I also don't agree with this framing of "planned economy vs free market," as if planning is doomed to failure, and markets work.

It is true that previously planned economies have had problems. Planning be that way, though. Plans are hard, and when you plan things, sometimes it doesn't work out, but that doesn't mean that the notion of planning in and of itself is inherently flawed. Planning fails all the time in all facets of life, but there's only one facet of life, the economy, where we have for some reason decided that that means the concept of planning itself is broken, rather than previous plans failed.

The market is just the absence of a plan, which is a little bit of a tricky abstraction, and ends up being a bit unfalsifiable. It's got this teflon quality to it, where even when markets collapse, as they do all the time, they don't get blamed for it. Right now, we are living through the worst possible failure of an economic system -- the literal destruction of the planet. There is no greater failure mode, yet somehow, markets don't get blamed for it, and are still seen as fundamentally sound.

The dream, for me, is a democratically planned economy. True economic and political democracy. We have a lot to learn to understand how that would work, but dreaming, and then figuring out how to achieve that dream, is the stuff of socialist politics.