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In the interview, a listener asks Wolff a provocative question: “Under your system of worker cooperatives, would I still get my PlayStation 5?”
Wolff, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, offered this response:
Absolutely. You’d have to struggle a little bit for it. You’d have to talk to your fellow workers. You’d have to talk about the distribution of income. You’d have to compare your desire for PlayStation against all the other interests against all the other people. It wouldn’t be something you worked out on your own with your particular boss, in any way. It would have to be a democratic decision. You’d have to come to terms with that the way you do with democratic decisions now in our society to the extent that we have them.
It’s a long, meandering, virtually incoherent response. Wolff answers yes, you’d absolutely have a PS5 — and then proceeds to illustrate all the reasons a PS5 wouldn’t be created in a socialist system.
When Wolff says “You’d have to compare your desire for PlayStation against all the other interests of all the other people,” he’s asking the impossible.
There is no way to measure desire any more than there is to determine something’s innate value.
Value is subjective. Some people couldn’t care less if they had a PS5, while others break down in tears of joy when they receive a PS5 for Christmas. And then there’s the matter of context. I currently value my PS5 a lot more than I value my shoes and the 20 ounce ribeye in my freezer. But if I didn’t have any shoes or had barely eaten in days, that could change real fast.
This is why we have prices. In a free market, entrepreneurs demonstrate their demand for resources — capital, labor, space, on and on — by the price they are willing to pay for them, much like consumers decide whether to buy a product at a given price or use their money elsewhere.
Prices are a pillar of a free-market economy. They are signals that indicate supply and demand to buyers and sellers alike, and the best tool in the universe for allocating scarce resources efficiently.
Wolff makes no mention of prices at all while discussing constructing a PS5, but we’re left to believe that the listener will get his video game console so long as he can convince his fellow workers that his desire for one warrants it when factored against the interests of “all the other people.”
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“If socialists understood economics,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist F. A. Hayek once quipped, “they wouldn’t be socialists.”
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Much more:
https://fee.org/articles/a-marxist-...to-explain-how-socialism-would-deliver-a-ps5/
