This could be my last post!

[Pauls' Revere]

michael jackson died.

who's that?

 

[Shaka]

Shaka should stay, why are you guys so mad?

Cool! I'm glad to see that there is at least one free-market economist on this forum. I was starting to think that I'd accidentally registered at KarlMarxForums.com!

The question that divides us today is reminiscent of the Communist vs. Fascist debate that engaged the Germans in the 1920's.

On the communist side, the Soviet central planners thought they could mimic the efficiency of the market while retaining for themselves the "surplus value" or "social dividend" or whatever one wants to call it, which they could then distribute ad libitum. As recently as 2007, James Yunker has championed this plan:

This article evaluates the performance of contemporary capitalism relative to that of a hypothetical alternative designated "profit-oriented market socialism." In most respects, profit-oriented market socialism would closely mimic contemporary market capitalism. The major difference would be that most profits and interest generated by the operations of publicly-owned business enterprises would be distributed to the general public as a social dividend proportional to household wage and salary income rather than in proportion to household financial assets. The basis of the comparison is a small-scale but comprehensive computable general equilibrium model.

On the fascist side, the German Historical School, led by Gustav Schmoller, denounced the "bloodless abstractions" of the Classical School, preferring to publish historical studies, preferably such as dealt with labor conditions of the recent past, intending to aid the "people" in the war of liberation they were waging against the "exploiters."

Economics in the second German Reich, as represented by the government-appointed university professors, degenerated into an unsystematic, poorly assorted collection of various scraps of knowledge borrowed from history, geography, technology, jurisprudence, and party politics, larded with deprecatory remarks about the errors in the "abstractions" of the Classical School.

This was the position Gustav Schmoller embraced with regard to economics. Again and again he blamed the economists for having prematurely made inferences from quantitatively insufficient material. What, in his opinion, was needed in order to substitute a realistic science of economics for the hasty generalizations of the British "armchair" economists was more statistics, more history, and more collection of "material." Out of the results of such research the economists of the future, he maintained, would one day develop new insights by "induction."

As recently as 2002, James Devine has championed this plan:

The original statements by the rebellious French economics students define autistic economics in terms of its one-sided and exclusionary interest in "imaginary worlds," "uncontrolled use of mathematics" and the absence of pluralism of approaches in economics. The hard-core autistic walling off from the societal environment can be seen most strongly in the specific, highly abstract, axiomatic school that the students protested against.

In Germany, the issue was settled in favor of the fascists by the simple expedient of exterminating the Jews, who were mostly communists. In other countries, like Ukraine, the issue was settled in favor of the communists by the simple expedient of inducing mass starvation.

I offer a third alternative:

Instead of attempting to untie it, I cut the Gordian knot of GE Theory by throwing all of Walras’ and Pareto’s assumptions overboard and starting from scratch with my own set of axioms. When faced with a dilemma "in the context of GE Theory," I invented Axiomatic Economics. As Hannibal Barca said, "we will either find a way, or make one." The same goes for libertarians; we will never accept socialism.

 

[Shaka]

Peter J. Boettke writes:

Theodore A. Burczak's Socialism after Hayek is a thoroughly researched and thoughtful examination not only of the ideological debate that framed the twentieth century, but of Hayek's intellectual framework. Burczak hopes for an economic framework that is both humanistic in its approach and humanitarian in its concern while being grounded in good reasons. The book should be on the reading list of every comparative political economist and in particular anyone who wants to take Hayek seriously, including those who would like to push Hayek's classical liberal politics toward the left in the twenty-first century. Burczak has made an outstanding contribution to the fields of political and economic thought and to Hayek studies in particular.

I purchased the book and will write a critique. In the meantime, I will quote from page one to give you an idea what it is about:

Classical socialism was a movement to replace the unplanned and exploitative institutions of capitalism with national planning, public ownership, and distribution according to human need rather than by the arbitrary capriciousness of the market. Its goals were to distribute economic resources broadly among the people in order to create the conditions for widespread substantive freedom and to end alienating, exploitative labor processes. Socialism promised all people the resources to live a flourishing life, not just the market freedom to exchange, which offered no guarantee of a decent standard of living. This traditional socialist project was derived from Marx and Engel's dream of a future that would transcend the allocative and distributional anarchy of the market through the abolition of private property and the establishment of social ownership of the means of production and central planning. Socialism, or perhaps its more advanced form of communism, would realize the human potential to harness productive forces to achieve a rational economic order, social justice, and real freedom for all.

Classical socialism had no larger enemy in the twentieth century than Friedrich Hayek... Hayek's economics and social theory are based on what might be called an "applied epistemological postmodernism."

For contemporary socialists, this raises fundamental questions. Is there any meaningful notion of socialism that can answer Hayek's epistemological critique?

My aim in this book is to answer these questions in the affirmative by developing a "libertarian Marxist" conception of socialism, a socialism committed to forms of procedural and distributive justice that are central to the Marxian tradition and a socialism keenly aware of the factual and ethical problems emphasized by Hayek.

I skimmed Burczak's book.

Basically, he feels that Hayek's Road to Serfdom, which was written in 1944, is outdated because it takes the Soviet Union as its model for central planning. Burczak feels that modern socialists are sooooo much smarter than those dumb Russians, that there is just no comparison.

What do you guys think? Should we give Burczak control of the economy and see if he really is as smart as he thinks he is?

 

[Shaka]

Some people should be told their ideas are stupid, it saves time.

So now we know what the socialists think of the OP.

But what do the free-market economists think of the OP?

 

[Dr.3D]

So .. besides being a fancy sesquipedalian in forum posts and in your own self-published book - do you have any works published in peer-reviewed journals?

For those trying to follow this thread, this may be helpful.

[FONT=Trebuchet MS, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]Sesquipedalian n. One who is inordinately infatuated with polysyllabic obfuscation, preferring never to employ a less complicated syntactic arrangement of descriptive words when there exists a single expressive unit that amalgamates the multiplicity of morphemes comprising the simpler phrase. Among the manifold objectives of multisyllabic, holophrastic verbalism are those of: rendering the author's meaning indisputably precise yet simultaneously incomprehensible; demonstrating through superior orthography and lexical awareness that the writer is manifestly more erudite than the reader; disempowering intellectual challenge to the proponent's argument by using logomachinations to divert discussion to the establishment of the opponent's comprehension of the vocabulary as opposed to addressing the factual import of the treatise which, upon analysis, may well prove amphigorous. The obscurantist sesquipedalian is likely to compound the reader's difficulties by indulging in glossosynthesis, thus enabling the author to dismiss all opposing views as ultracrepidarious. In other words, a sesquipedalian is one who would call a spade a manuo-pedal excavationary implement.[/FONT]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A640207

 

[Grozny]

Oh, Hi Victor Aguilar

Hi!

 

[CasualApathy]

So, Shaka got banned...

why?

Edit: Ah, I see this happened a while ago.

[rphedit - no idea, but locking this thread