But it is a mechanism which canbe used only for a common end; and the question of the precise goal towardwhich all activity is to be directed will arise as soon as the executive power hasto translate the demand for a single plan into a particular plan,

We can unfortunately not indefinitelyextend the sphere of common action and still leave the individual free in hisown sphere. Once the communal sector, in which the state controls all themeans, exceeds certain proportion of the whole, the effects of its actions dom-inate the whole system. Although the state controls directly the use of only alarge part of the available resources, the effects of its decisions on the remain-ing part of the economic system become so great that indirectly it controlsalmost everything, Where, as was, for example, true in Germany as early as1928, the central and local authorities directly control the use of more than halfthe national income (according to an official German estimate then, 53 perthey control indirectly almost the whole economic life of the nation.There is, then, scarcely an individual end which is not dependent for itsachievement on the action of the state, and the “social scale of values” whichguides the state’s action must embrace practically all individual ends.

Eric Zencey wrote that the free market economy Hayek advocated is designed for an infinite planet, and when it runs into physical limits (as any growing system must), the result is a need for centralized planning to mediate the problematic interface of economy and nature. "Planning is planning, whether it's done to minimize poverty and injustice, as socialists were advocating then, or to preserve the minimum flow of ecosystem services that civilization requires, as we are finding increasingly necessary today."[70]