I was curious if anyone has read Joseph Solerno’s or Hoppe’s critique of Hayek’s critique on socialism and what your thoughts were?
According to Hoppe, Hayek’s theory of why socialism could not work was not only “fallacious from the outset” but only served to add confusion to the whole economic calculation debate. Hoppe, like Mises, believed the real problem with socialism was a lack of private property in land and capital goods and that the lack of centralized knowledge was just an effect not a cause of socialisms shortcomings.
Hoppe critiqued Hayek’s theory by stating that (1) if the problem with socialism is the use of centralized knowledge than why don’t families and firms suffer from the same issues?. And (2) if decentralization of knowledge is the answer why are the problems with socialism fundamentally different than those from any other social organization?
So what do you guys think? Does Hoppe have a point here or has does his objections of Hayek’s theory totally miss the mark?
Btw, incase you guys are interested here is the link to the Hoppe piece Im talking about.
Ronald Coaes famously showed that corporations do suffer from the same problems as a socialist economy. The reason corporations exist is because just as there are benefits to using the market, there are also costs–transaction costs–and corporations grow to the point where the costs of explicit/deliberate social calculation equal transaction costs.
I’m pretty sure Peter Klein shows that the socialist calculation problem does apply to firms, which could be at odds with the first part of Hoppe’s critique.
No. It’s just that people are less likely to die when things go pear-shaped at that scale.
Aren’t you supposed to have real personal relationships with members of your family? Isn’t that its only possible salvation? How can millions of people in a nation-state all have real personal relationships with each other? How many people does the average person even know on a first-name basis?
Members of families screw each other over all the time, and they’re supposed to know and like each other. It’s sort of comical that people expect the whole primordial baboon troop concept to work when what we’ve essentially got now is a termite colony.
