Ulhas says:
>While one must bear in mind costs and revenues (or magnitudes of values) in
the short run, the basic objective of socialism must be to undermine and do
away with the value form as such. I am not sure, though, how it is to be
achieved.
I don't go in for value talk, but I take thsi to be a roundabout way of saying taht it the ultimatre objective of socialism to abolsih markets. Taht begs the question. My point has been, we can only do this if we have another wqay of doing what markets do, which is to give us reasonably accurate measures of costs. I am not aware of any such alternative that I find remotely credible.
Ian adds that market measures are not accurate beacuse markets (as well known) create incentives to externalize costs. This is true, and it is part of why markets alone can't be the sole unrestrained ways of allocating resources in our societies. I am a socialist, not a libertarian, and the markers I would support would coexist with a strong government, lots of regulation, and a substantial democratic participatory element.
In addition there is a technical economic reason why worker self-managed cooperative socialism would be more eco-friendly than capitalism or state socialism, but I leave that point for another time.
Another inrerlocutor objects to my claim that efficiency merely allows us to realize our other values effectively, commenting:
> ...
> Measures of efficiency _do_
tell us what to choose, because they're measured along some
existing spectrum of values -- the most efficient process
being the one which costs least and returns most. It is only
according to some pre-existing notion of value in which cost
and return can be cast; there can be no such thing as value-
free efficiency. . . . This seems obvious. Am I missing something?
What I mean by a measure of efficiency is roughly a measure that allows us to obtain whatever economic result we want with the least use of other inputs. Other things being equal we do care about that because if we use more resources and time than we have to, that excess is, it would appear, wasted. it is, at any rate, something we cannot use for something else,w hether more production or more leisure. We might decide that we cared to subsidize some activity that used more resources or time for whatever reason, perhaps because it promoted other values we cared about. But the decision would not be rational or properly informed unless we knew we were doing this.
--jks