Originally posted by
[email protected] 13 2006, 07:26 AM
Long but very much worth reading
http://homepages.luc.edu/~dschwei/demdialectic.htm
Interesting but nothing new.
The key phrase is this:
An amazing feat, the neoclassical solution, but unfortunately inadequate to the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem, recall, is normative.
Normative = subjective. Basically, marxists don't like the free market, neoclassical approach because they think it's unfair.
Then there's this:
If a person works x hours to produce goods or services consumed by others, then she should receive in return goods and services that it took others x hours to produce.
As the author notes, this would be infeasible in practice. How do we track which goods and services others consume that would require them to repay that consumption with their own production? If worker A puts in 8 hours at the furniture collective but nobody from the wheat collective consumes his furniture, how is he to be rewarded with 8 hours worth of wheat?
Finally the author's main premise is that capitalists and landowners are not engaged in any productive activity. He tries to split capitalists and landowners apart from entrepreneurs. This is absurd - they are one and the same. Someone has to be an entrepreneur to see the value in the land, and so to take the risk to make the purchase. The author simply dismisses risk as a factor, which is an act of cognitive dissonance. A capitalist/entrepreneur takes the risk that the public wants to consume the good he is going to pay people to produce. Labor produces things which the public may or may not want - how can we honestly claim that labor should be rewarded for the sake of being labor even if they produce X number of goods that nobody wants? This is the key reason a communist economy would be highly inefficient.