...and I'd argue that it's the opposite in the United States - namely business has more political sway than our elected officials when it comes to making policy and changing laws.
I think you missed the main point of the article. This isn't about business vs. government having more power, it's about few vs. many.
Yeah, it's actually a fairly old (but still interesting) observation that very large corporations are a form of top-down central planning. In fact many old-school communists first got inspired by late-19th-century capitalism's trend towards managed technocracy. There was a large movement in business that argued that production could be scientifically optimized using statistics, data collection, scientific management, etc. The communists just took it to its logical conclusion and asked, why not organize all of society in the optimal manner, using principles of technocratic scientific management? Even that argument was more or less originated by capitalists; some of the large industrial trusts argued that there was no problem with monopolies, because they were simply the most efficient, scientifically managed form of industrial production, unlike the messy, inefficient web of competing small businesses they had replaced. So really the only thing they disagreed on was how the profits of the centrally managed monopoly should be distributed.
There's an odd amount of borrowing in the other direction, too. Many large businesses do realize that they internally are basically inefficient, bureaucratic command economies, mirroring some of the problems with the Soviet system. So they introduce some of the same attempted solutions that the Soviets tried: intra-corporation pseudo-markets, competition and awards, recently the trend of "gamifying" workplaces, etc. (At the risk of self-promotion, I recently wrote a bit on the latter similarity: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/soviet_gamification.html)
Well, there are also companies that use full on market based systems internally. For example Alcoa has an 'internal market structure' for sourcing materials, and shuttering inefficient subsidaries if they cannot compete on price internally.
Well, nobody is talking about "business versus government", so please don't just cherry-pick or take parts of these comments out of context. We're talking about key concepts in Political Economy (PE) and I'm clearing saying that I disagree that Central Planning takes place in the way the author implies. The author tells us that the widening income gap is leading to ... central planning. And I say that's totally not true, it's a false causality. A terrible income gap exists, but Central Planning = Government decides and industry follows, like in China. Our system is the opposite, with industry deciding and government getting out of the way. That's Corporatism, not Central Planning. I'm saying that Corporatism creates the income gap, so Central Planning, if it exists, has nothing to do with it. Here's another way to say it: a circular block will fit into a much larger square hole, but that doesn't make it a square ;)
I'm not trying to quote you out of context, sorry if it came across that way.
Central Planning = Government decides and industry follows, like in China.
If you want to take this as a definition, then fine, we have nothing to argue about. But if you just give the phrase its literal meaning, I believe the article is arguing that: One form of central planning is what you described. Another is a very small number of entities controlling a very large amount of money.
Well, if it's a definition it's a crappy 2-second one so I apologize for that.
I hear what you're saying here and I agree. In any effect, we can probably all agree that the end result of all this is overwhelmingly negative for the long-run productivity growth of the US economy, and that means more stagnating real wages, more structural unemployment, and more hardship for a lot of families. Some would argue that we need MORE central planning to lead the economy out of this hole, and there was a good op-ed in the NYTimes about why this probably isn't possible with our current government.
I think you missed the main point of the article. This isn't about business vs. government having more power, it's about few vs. many.