Sent from my iPad
On Oct 12, 2012, at 11:14 AM, "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> My objection to Hayek is that he wants to use markets to provide
> information, therefore reinstituting commodity fetishism. It's no use
> getting rid of capitalism if the labor of one person continues to be equated
> (implicitly or explicitly) to the labor of others. Pre-capitalist markets
> exerted no tyranny: the labor of one nation was not cheapened by the labor
> of another. Hayek's markets are specifically defined to exercise that
> tyranny.
>
> In other words the core objection to Hayek is precisely what Andie cites as
> the core advantage -- the use of markets to convey information.
>
>
> Carrol
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
> On
>> Behalf Of andie_nachgeborenen
>> Sent: Friday, October 12, 2012 8:01 AM
>> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Hayek, was Re: Stalinism (was Eric Hobsbawm)
>>
>> Nothing in Hayek requires private ownership, a point I have made to
> generations
>> of spluttering libertarians. Hayek's problem is with planning, not
> ownership. His
>> attempted save by appeal to the need for entrepreneurship, with which I
> agree
>> heartily, fails because nothing in Hayek's argument requires the
> entrepreneurs be
>> individual private owners rather than employees of a cooperative,
> regardless of
>> where title lies.
>>
>> Multiple equilibria are irrelevant. The problem is a model that makes
> equilibrium a
>> goal based on false premises. Hayek, like Marx, is great in part because
> he tried to
>> capture the laws of motion of real economic systems, not axiomatic models
> with
>> demonstrably false premises.
>>
>> Lange's reply that they never tried what I advocated is ridiculously weak
> given
>> what they did try produced every problem Hayek observed/predicted in
> spades.
>> You can believe that pigs will fly if you like. I will continue to insist
> with Heyek that
>> they have no wings.
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>> On Oct 12, 2012, at 7:39 AM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
>>> Thu Oct 11 07:51:12 PDT 2012
>>>
>>> [WS:] The existence of the mythical equilibrium is a red herring here,
>>> since as Ormerod demonstrated in his book "Death of Economics"
>>> multiple equilibria can be calculated in sufficiently complex system.
>>> The crux of Lange's argument was that planners do not need to know
>>> more than private capitalists, as both in real life proceed through
>>> the process of trials and errors to adjust their prices. So that
>>> undercuts the supposed omniscience required in planning but not
>>> private capitalism - in fact neither requires it to improve
>>> efficienc
>>> Lange argued that both planning and capitalism are on equal footing in
>>> this respect. What makes planning superior is the planning ability to
>>> overcome constraints imposed by private ownership of property, which
>>> leads to either periodical crises or equilibria skewed away from
>>> optimum toward consumption of the rich. I do not think that this
>>> argument can be dismissed that easily.
>>>
>>> As far as the price mechanisms under planning postulated by Lange -
>>> they were either not implemented or if they were, they were later
>>> circumvented by political and social mechanisms (informal economy,
>>> etc.) So as Lange aptly observed, the reasons of the central planning
>>> "failure" lie not in planning but in sociology and politics.
>>>
>>> Alas, there is one thing that is not considered in these arguments -
>>> the capacity to externalize costs. That capacity is much greater in
>>> capitalism - under which private firms can not only dump costs on they
>>> public sector in their own countries, but also on other countries
>>> thanks to imperialism. In planning systems, the capacity for cost
>>> externalization was pretty much non-existent. First, the public
>>> ownership of the means of production meant that public sector would
>>> have to externalize to itself, which defeats the purpose. Second, the
>>> planned economies lacked the capacity to externalize on other
>>> countries because they were not imperialist (EE) or because their
>>> imperialism had strategic rather than economic nature - i.e. its goal
>>> was to maintain political influence against the west, rather than
>>> economic exploitation. In other words, while western imperialists
>>> externalized their costs on their satellites, Russian imperialists
>>> absorbed the costs of satellites to maintain their allegiance.
>>>
>>> -- Wojtek
>>>
>>> "An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."
>>>
>>> ^^^^^^^
>>> CB: I would to identify with Comrade Wojtek's remarks . Soviet Union
>>> far from an evil empire was an anti-imperialist system
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