Bill Bartlett :
>Also, you have to lok ath the alternative. We knwo for
>damn sure that totally centrally planed economies
>don't wirk either.
And that is the only alternative?
^^^^^
Bill Bartlett, you don't have accept this. The claim is very shaky that the history of the Soviet Union, Cuba and other first efforts at centrally planned economies prove "for damn sure" for all times that centralized planning cannot be done. It's ridiculous actually.
Promarketeers certainly were patient for centuries of the market screwing things up royally without declaring it impossible for the market to do good economics; that is before we got the market's current level of "perfection" (hardy har har). Which gets to the second ridiculousness of the Hayekian position. How is it H's claim the market is good at distributing the product ? The market is terrible at _distributing_ the product. The market, capitalism, excels at _producing_ the product, not distributing it. The market is infamous for creating inequalities and irrationalities in the distribution of the wealth, the social product, of society.
The #%$##@*! thing about the Hayekian position is that it is exactly wrong. Capitalism is _not_ good at the "market" mechanism of getting things around to people. It is good at producing things, but then it wastes so much: what good is it to produce so much if you don't get it to the masses of people ? Capitalism fails precisely in its market function in the common sense meaning of "market" as where things get distributed, not made. We need to preserve from capitalism its Shop, not its Market. Sublate capitalism: Overcome the Market and preserve the Shop.
Why are "market magicians" so impatient with historical practice in developing centralized planning ? Not only that. The SU or Cuba are far from some total failure, or even a failure compared with the history of markets in distribution. Actual socialism has been especially good at distrbuting what _is_ produced more equally than markets. Actual socialism has trailed the capitalisms it competes with in production , not distribution. Claims of the failure of centralized planning are empirically disproven by the actual facts of the countries marketeers base their claim on. They speak as if socialist planning has had no great successes.
The actual history centralized planning has not demonstrated that it can never be done, especially with learning from mistakes of the first efforts , the normal, scientific process of trial and error.
Anti-Sovietism is a deadly poison to left thinking still.