Both Democrats and Republicans claim that your life will be better if you leave planning up to them and the bureaucracies they will create.

Search the Whitehouse.gov website for examples of government planning:

You will find the following plans (as of February, 2008):
• "The President's plan will make private health insurance more affordable."
• "implementation of the North American Pandemic Influenza Plan" [pdf]
• "The President's Plan To Strengthen America's Energy Security"
• "The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief
• "Today, President Bush Discussed The Four Parts Of His Practical Plan To Confront High Gas Prices"
•  "President Bush Announces Private-Sector Plan To Help Struggling Homeowners

Search the Democrats website:

• Senate Democrats' Katrina Relief Plan
• House Democrats Have A Plan

From the Democrat Party Platform: [pdf]

• "We have a plan to build a strong, respected America: protecting our people, rebuilding our alliances, and leading the way to a more peaceful and prosperous world."
• "We have a plan to build a strong, growing economy: creating good jobs, rewarding hard work, and restoring fiscal discipline."
• "We have a plan to help our people build strong, healthy families: securing quality health care, offering world-class education, and ensuring clean air and water."
• "No strategy for American security is complete without a plan to end America's dependence on Mideast oil. "
• "Even the Administration's own economists have found that their energy plan will do nothing to reduce gas prices"
• "Harnessing American ingenuity to create renewable energy. Our plan begins with commonsense investments to harness the natural world around us—the sun, wind, water, geothermal and biomass sources, and a rich array of crops—to create a new generation of affordable energy for the 21st century. By mobilizing the amazing productivity of America's farmers, we can grow our own cleaner-burning fuel."
• "We offer America a new economic plan that will put jobs first. We will renew American competitiveness, make honest budget choices, and invest in our future."
• "A plan to reinvigorate manufacturing. Manufacturing has lost 2.5 million jobs under President Bush in its worst jobs crisis since the Depression. John Kerry, John Edwards and the Democrats will launch a concerted effort to revitalize American manufacturing. The measures outlined above are important components of our overall strategy. In addition, based on the model that has helped launch some of America's most successful companies, we will establish new investment corporations to give small and medium-sized businesses access to capital. And we will support the growth of high-technology "clusters" that invest in new industries around research institutions."

This is all nonsense. These government plans will never work. They cannot work. Click here to find out why. Or, read more from the Democrat Party Platform:

• "Promoting small businesses. Small businesses and entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of our economy. We will encourage small business growth with a plan to make it easier for small businesses to secure capital and loans."
• "Through our jobs plan, we will bring hope and jobs back to the cities and small towns devastated by the shuttering of factories."
• "John Kerry, John Edwards and the Democratic Party believe in a stronger, more prosperous America for all our people. We believe in an America where the great American promise of upward mobility is alive and well. We believe in an America where the middle class is growing, our economy is thriving, and America is strong. And we have a plan to build that America."
• "The price of gas is at an all time-high, placing an enormous burden on millions of Americans who have no choice but to drive to work. We will help cut costs in the short-run by halting additional stockpiling of oil reserves and working more effectively to ensure that OPEC increases production. For the long-run, we offer a detailed plan for energy independence."
• "Cutting health care costs. At the center of our efforts will be a plan to reduce health costs. "

Obviously there are many more "plans" in the Platform that don't use the word "plan." Every area of your life is being planned by misled bureaucrats in government. Click here to find out why they are misled.

History has handed down a powerful verdict: government planning does not work. In every case where the government attempts to plan, it creates failure. In every case where it is allowed to function freely, the Free Market produces miraculous results of prosperity and liberty -- millions of business owners, entrepreneurs, investors, consumers, non-profit and voluntary associations pool their information together across spontaneous networks of communication and cooperation, plan for their individual futures, and raise the standard of living for all people, even the poorest.

Every American should spend an hour learning why that claim is historically true and inescapably rational. Here are some resources to help make up for what government-planned schools neglected to teach you:

Why Government Planning Always Fails by Randal O'Toole.

We now know New Deal planning did more to prolong the Depression than it did to end it. [proof] We know urban-renewal planning in the 1950s and 1960s displaced more than a million, mostly black, low-income families from their homes and turned some inner city neighborhoods into bombed-out landscapes. [proof] We know President Nixon's wage-and-price controls led to energy shortages but didn't stop inflation. [proof]

The government is incapable of successfully executing a plan to achieve the most simple goal. Consider the humble pencil. The President -- whether Clinton, Bush, or Obama -- does not know how to build a pencil. In fact, no human being knows how to build a pencil. No committee of human beings could build a pencil. The government could never build a pencil -- at the same price the Free Market can build a pencil. Here is a delightful essay on the pencil, with an introduction by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. Every American should read this essay before voting for a politician with a "plan."

Millions of people are needed to make a pencil. Yet the vast majority of them have no intention of creating a pencil. Lumber mills aren't thinking about making you your pencil. A company that makes yellow paint doesn't know about you or your desire for a pencil. A million decision-makers are coordinated by "the Invisible Hand" of the Free Market to bring you your pencil. All of the hundreds of businesses and millions of people involved in the making of a pencil are engaged in "economic planning" to keep their businesses profitable. They keep track of inventory, price fluctuations, forecasting, and make innumerable decisions based on the information they acquire through trade publications, the Wall Street Journal, and other sources. All of these millions of business owners have more information available to them than the government's economic planning board. They make decisions every hour of every day, instead of waiting for a bureaucracy to make decisions for them. And all of these people should be free to make their own decisions about how to run their own businesses, which, after all, are their own property. This is what America is supposed to be all about: Liberty Under God. Neither Democrats nor Republicans seem to understand these most basic political and economic facts of life.

Many people feel that if the government doesn't plan things, there will just be chaos and disorder. The forget that every socialist nation has failed to prosper, and has left the people in poverty and confusion. Prof. George Reisman explains why this is so in his important text, Capitalism:

       Division of labor in the planning process is possible only under capitalism. This is because of the existence of the price system, which is unique to capitalism. [Under Socialism, prices are set by government planners.] Under capitalism each individual plans his own particular sphere of economic activity. But he plans on the basis of a consideration of prices—the prices he will receive as a seller and must pay as a buyer.
       The consideration of prices is what integrates and harmonizes the plans of each individual with the plans of all other individuals and produces a fully and rationally planned economic system under capitalism. For example, a student changes his career plan from actor to accountant when he contemplates the vast difference in income he can expect to earn. A prospective home buyer changes his plan concerning which neighborhood to live in when he compares house prices in the different neighborhoods. And businesses change their plans concerning product lines, methods and locations of production, and every other aspect of their activities, in response to profit-and-loss calculations.
       All of these changes represent the adjustment of the plans of particular individuals and businesses to the plans of others in the economic system. For it is the plans of others to purchase accounting services rather than acting services that cause the higher income our student can expect to earn as an accountant rather than as an actor. It is the plans of others willing and able to pay more to live in certain neighborhoods, and less to live in certain others, that determine the relative house prices confronting our home buyer. It is the plans of its prospective customers, of all competing sellers of its goods, and of all other buyers of the means of production it uses or otherwise depends on, that enter into the formation of the prices determining the revenues and costs of any business firm and thus what it finds profitable or unprofitable to produce.
       Now the fact that capitalism even has economic planning, let alone the only possible kind of rational economic planning, is almost completely unknown. Practically everyone under capitalism has been in the position of Molière’s M. Jourdan, who spoke prose all his life without ever knowing it. The overwhelming majority of people have not realized that all the thinking and planning about their economic activities that they perform in their capacity as individuals actually is economic planning.  By the same token, the term “planning” has been reserved for the feeble efforts of a comparative handful of government officials, who, having prohibited the planning of everyone else, presume to substitute their knowledge and intelligence for the knowledge and intelligence of tens of millions, and to call that planning. This is an incredible state of affairs, one which implies the most enormous ignorance on the part of the great majority of today’s intellectuals, from journalists to professors.
       [On the myth of government economic planning, see Capitalism pp. 269-275. Read it here for free [pdf].]