How can a rational pricing system, or any pricing whatever, stop growth?
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 12:10 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Hayek, was Re: Stalinism (was Eric Hobsbawm)
>
> Exactly. Life is hard, commodity fetishism is the cost of rational pricing
and
> reasonable prosperity. Live with it. As Mises put it in his first paper in
1920 laying
> out the idea, you could choose to dispense with rational pricing (sensible
use of
> resources), embrace waste of resources and record, and live in poverty.
That's not
> an attractive option.
>
> 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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