"The End of Socialism and the Calculation Debate Revisited" - Rothbard
Posted by Anen-o-me@reddit | Libertarian | View on Reddit | 11 comments
At the root of the dazzling revolutionary implosion and collapse of socialism and central planning in the “socialist bloc” is what everyone concedes to be a disastrous economic failure.
The peoples and the intellectuals of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union are crying out not only for free speech, democratic assembly, and glasnost, but also for private property and free markets.
And yet, if I may be pardoned a moment of nostalgia, four-and-a-half-decades ago, when I entered graduate school, the economics Establishment of that era was closing the book on what had been for two decades the famed “socialist calculation debate.”
And they had all decided, left, right, and center, that there was not a thing economically wrong with socialism: that socialism’s only problems, such as they might be, were political. Economically, socialism could work just as well as capitalism.
Mises and the Challenge of Calculation Before Ludwig von Mises raised the calculation problem in his celebrated article in 1920, everyone, socialists and non-socialists alike, had long realized that socialism suffered from an incentive problem.
If, for example, everyone under socialism were to receive an equal income, or, in another variant, everyone was supposed to produce “according to his ability” but receive “according to his needs,” then, to sum it up in the famous question: Who, under socialism, will take out the garbage?
That is, what will be the incentive to do the grubby jobs, and, furthermore, to do them well? Or, to put it another way, what would be the incentive to work hard and be productive at any job?...
https://mises.org/mises-daily/end-socialism-and-calculation-debate-revisited
Heavy-Bell-2035@reddit
I think this stuff is important to pass on, but the calculation problem is esoteric and only of interest to people who care to learn about it and understand it, which is a massive minority of the population.
Also, capitalists need to stop harping on the "that wasn't real socialism" claim. Socialism has an incentive problem and a calculation problem, capitalism doesn't have a calculation problem but does have a similar incentive problem: that many people would rather cajole or outright steal than earn, and this tendency goes up and down income levels, from street criminals to the most successful cronies who use the federal and various state governments to steal at scale rather than guns and knives. It is just as ridiculous to claim what we have in the US, for example, isn't "real capitalism," because if you can't practically stop or even limit cronyism, then it's becoming plain that any and every system on the spectrum from communism to full on anarcho-capitalism will devolve into a cronyist oligarchy.
If you can't achieve the ideal of anarcho-capitalism and a fully privatized and explicitly voluntary society, then all arguments are about what practical compromises to it are more realistic and sustainable. In that world more European/Scandinavian models where the hoi polloi get access to some of their own cronyism in the form of subsidized services when they're young and old, enforced things like family leave and reasonable hours at work, guaranteed paid time off, etc., become viable options, as opposed to the US approach which seams to be to hand out welfare hand over fist to businesses while expecting individuals to bootstrap it.
Anen-o-me@reddit (OP)
There not a problem with capitalism, that's a problem with democracy.
Heavy-Bell-2035@reddit
No, it's a problem of capitalism because there will always be power centers to corrupt, whether people agree to then voluntarily or not, and human nature is what it is. People are going to steal and look for ways to scale their theft.
Anen-o-me@reddit (OP)
That's not a given actually, and your argument here applies to all current political systems, so again you can't ascribe it to capitalism. Every historical attempt at socialism became a horrific centralized authoritarian system that was worse the more centralized or became. The same is true of democracy.
But it's not a given that every system has centers of power that can be corrupted, since that has been my main focus of research in the last 20 years and I finally discovered an incorruptible system.
How? The nature is corruption is always about a 3rd party having power over another. They can then rent seek on their ability to force choices their choices on others.
Once you generalize all corruption in this way the solution becomes obvious:
The only person who will never cheat you is yourself, as you have nothing to gain by doing so. Your incentives are always aligned with your own goals and life.
Therefore it is possible to build a system which either has no corruption or at least minimizes it heavily by fully decentralizing political decision making to the individual level.
No more democracy, no more representatives, no more Congress, no presidency. No being born into a system you didn't consent to.
Each person must give hard consent to every law they live by. Then corruption is absolutely minimized.
As just one example, this is the only viable solution to the lobbying problem I've ever seen in my entire life of studying the problem.
If all we did was solve the lobbying problem, I would say that's enough, you've already earned the Nobel prize that's coming to you and changed the world forever, nothing more is required. But that's not all it solves.
It solves corporate corruption through private-State collusion and backroom deals, it solves oligarchy and regulatory capture, it solves the undue influence generally of large corporations.
And it fixes numerous social problems caused by the adversarial nature of democracy itself.
But you can't steal from yourself. That's the key.
Heavy-Bell-2035@reddit
Too much pedantry, human nature leads to corruptanle power centers because people tend toward tribalism, they voluntarily give over their will to others, and they demand others do too, and coerce them to if they resist. And the coerced have margins for what they'll tolerate and allow just to get by. That's reality. If you're just going to argue from some ideal that can't ever exist in reality then your right back with the socialists trying to change human nature.
If your ideal system requires every human being to realize their free and in control of their own lives and actively defend that status for themselves and on behalf of others, it's useless, because that will never happen.
Anen-o-me@reddit (OP)
A. They know no other way. You live in the modern era and should know better, this way of life is merely hundreds of years old, new ways is the spirit of the age.
B. It can exist, I'm not arguing an ideal, I'm arguing a practical new way of dealing with the problem of political decision making. Your "can't ever exist" argument would've been a lot stronger 250 years ago when monarchy was all that existed for thousands of years. It's a silly argument post overthrow of they system for global self government.
What I'm arguing is merely a refinement of the idea of self government which is already considered a global ideal and a global good.
C. It doesn't require "every human being to realize their free and in control of their own lives and actively defend that status for themselves", people already want individual liberty, democracy delivered them only a fraction of that. Once people get a taste of the real thing they will never go back. This idea doesn't require individual defense, people will immediately form political units on a voluntary basis and tackle problems in cooperative groups.
You seem to think this concept somehow made that impossible or unlikely, instead it makes it baseline an ethical in a way democracy never could.
AutoModerator@reddit
Reminder: 'not-true'-socialism has killed 100 million people. But wait, that was actually state capitalism! Carry on, comrade!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
real_LNSS@reddit
Ideally AI and robots would do the grubby jobs. But for some reason they're taking the creative jobs instead!?!?
Anen-o-me@reddit (OP)
Robots are behind, it's temporary.
Aromatic_Concert_620@reddit
Yeah this is the part a lot of tankies still refuse to grapple with. It was not “real socialism has never been tried,” it was tried at full industrial scale and it faceplanted exactly where Mises said it would.
You can centrally plan slogans and parades, but you cannot centrally plan dispersed knowledge and price signals. The garbage still has to get picked up and someone has to decide what resources go where, and without real prices they are just guessing with people’s lives.
AutoModerator@reddit
Reminder: 'not-true'-socialism has killed 100 million people. But wait, that was actually state capitalism! Carry on, comrade!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.