You'd be smart to accuse me, here, of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but the core parasite is Capital, which siphons value from the labor of mankind in a Byzantine labyrinth of social games meant to obscure this essential truth.
But capital through markets is how we get around the "labyrinth" that is the economic calculation problem. I think it's like complaining about how you lose power when you transfer electricity over wires. It's true, but there's always going to be a transmission cost.
>The Mises Institute has put it up for free, which is surely off-message but whatever.
Ah, a clearly well-rationed article is at foot. Here’s a hint, if someone isn’t able to model free things in their understanding of capitalist systems, they don’t understand them enough to critique them.
Anyway, the rest of that “critique” isn’t actually a critique. It’s just goal post shifting to the point where it assumes socialist systems by nature have perfect demand discovery mechanisms (none of which are alluded to) and can never produce a surplus. Conveniently, it follows that clearly socialist systems are perfectly efficient and do not allow surpluses because they have this neat built in mechanism of perfect demand discovery.
So it’s “not true socialism” if there are any inefficiencies in food production, energy production, etc because “true socialism” has a mechanism by which everyone gets exactly what they need.
Did someone inform the author of this that such a mechanism has never existed and the most efficient mechanism we have discovered so far is markets?
> the most efficient mechanism we have discovered so far is markets?
This thread originated in a discussion of the detriments of advertising, I would remind you. The "markets" we're currently employing to "discover demand" find greater profit in engendering it.
I know people love to parrot this libertarian talking without really thinking it through. Generally young, logic-minded people that end up following some kind of Randianism and cannot fathom the possibility that people are, by and large, basically bastards to each other.
The truth is the government is a social contract designed to actually protect people from violence. Yeah, it taxes people. But it also protects them from mobsters and racketeers and is at least supposed to offer a chance to poor people. A libertarian paradise dooms the poor to never be able to afford education and basic necessities unless they sacrifice through slave wages. In a libertarian paradise, the rich run amok, and children of rich people start with an insane advantage that no amount of smartness or slaving away will ever erase. And no, by and large, people are not Howard Roarks in hiding. Most people are within 2 sigma of the mean--i.e. not geniuses. In a situation with no social contract, the 5 sigmas both in terms of intelligence and aggressiveness prey on and suppress the rest. Inequality skyrockets. It ultimate results in violent revolutions, like France. In short, libertarianism is madness.
In general it'd be great to have a discussion about these things, but since this comment is just some non-thinking spouting of absurdity, I'll just leave it here. I already said too much.
But your example of the French Revolution detracts from your argument, because that occurred in the context of a strong monarchist government, not a libertarian dystopia.
I do think the period directly following the revolution in which the rival factions fought over the country is a context of a libertarian dystopia, if only a glimpse of one.
Another way would be to say that effective government ensures that the rule of law is maintained, that contracts are enforced, that the environment is protected, that trade is conducted efficiently etc ..
Granted, none of the above are absolute, some governments will do better than others and some will abuse their power.
What is the alternative? Somalia in the late nineties? All government functions handled by corporations? something else?
