>>2846649the failure and success of western communist parties has quite a lot to do with central planning: central planning requires a center by definition. if you pick any of these random failures and have them fluke their way into power, you will have an
incompetent center. more generally, central planning puts a lot of weight on having a competent center. the primary appeal of a market economy, looking at so much uncorrected failure, is that it has mechanisms for clearing out failure. when seers CEO gets some bizarre notions about how to run a firm, seers goes bankrupt and dies and other more competent retail outlets eat their lunch. (even if those firms are also incompetent, they just have to be less incompetent!)
more generally, the fundamental problem i see in the world today is institutional incompetence. the british government can't build railways, the US government can't build HSR, and yet you envision a world where we can shake our magic wand once for revolution and twice for total overhaul of the economy, get some linear programmers in, and
just like that all will be fixed.
pray, mr. babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures…? i am not an advocate in the free market in the sense of being a deep enthusiast for it with an intuitive love of it. i am an advocate in the sense of a devil's advocate, in the sense that i think the standard marxist arguments do not hold up well to conditions on the ground and are not in any case well understood by the average marxist (who instead intuits, in a woolly sense, that Marx's bible must agree with him and that a cleverer person will sort it all out), i am of the view that
at the very least we've got to reach the same conclusion as china, that productive forces are insufficiently developed to allow a leap to communism and therefore we're stuck with markets in the short run. if
ideal central planning can outperform the market, sub-ideal central planning can easily underperform it. (we can point here to the soviet example. even if you want to go "ah, actually, it was beating the market in 1930!", the very fact one bumbling idiot could come in and have the entire economy cannibalise itself by 1989 speaks to the enormous risks of
an incompetent center)
you will be quite correct to say i've dodged your questions, and i
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