Of course it’s okay if a free market isn’t perfect, because the market tends towards a certain equilibrium. Rules, on the other hand, don’t tend towards an equilibrium unless you have a market for rules, too (polycentric law or anarchocapitalism). Governments initiating force to enforce a set of rules are decidedly one-sided and not even-handed about exercising power over individuals. So I agree that there will always be rules, but I disagree that there will always be governments or that there always need to be governments, unless you want to radically redefine the term, ‘government’.
As for the guy that missed the $5 cheaper price, well that’s one of the purposes of advertising, to inform people of retailers, products, and prices. Maybe it WAS worth the extra $5 to not spend the time and effort of shopping around, or checking up on the advertising. How can you say it wasn’t without knowing what he was thinking? To say “he didn’t know” is to say he didn’t find out before making his purchase.
I accept most all your comments here, and think your first statement is part of my key issue - that “a free market isn’t perfect” … and that to say it’s ‘free’ doesn’t necessitate it being a guarantee of optimization for each and every transaction. I know that most readers know that, but it seems that some want to treat market equilibrium as sacrosanct - or perhaps I only get that impression because of their need to emphasize the opposite extreme of socialism, which I abhor in all too. Unfortunately I’m can’t bring myself to be as optimistic as you sound about a day when controlling, intervening governments will cease to exist or meddle in the market’s functioning for its own aims, given that there will always be those who wish to get something for nothing (and what better way than on the public dole). Cheers.
This is saying something different from what you said before. Your previous statement implied that government was necessary to enforce rules–that’s what I was arguing against. This statement, that governments exist so that people can use social aggression, is a different statement, but it at least implies that government is unncessary, however difficult it may be to get rid of it.
I had said “that’s okay, just as it’s okay that there will always be set rules and therefore permanent government of some kind or another” - so you’re right on, I did say that didn’t I. What I meant, in context to what had been leading up to it, is that the world is imperfect and always will be (which also means the hopes of a purely free market system) - and, key point, it’s okay to accept this fact since it’s immutable. Thanks for that good catch!
Price formation is the process Lange felt could be replicated by socialist planners in order to overcome Mises’ calculation problem, basically by trial and error. Lange admitted defeat to Mises and Hayek because he realized that socialist planners could not arrive at prices for higher-order goods without the extensive (and wasteful) process of trial and error.
Thats the Hayekian view I see spread most commonly. I was hoping to promote what appears to be another criticism of socialism, which Hayek had, which was that the problem of making the best use of knowledge in society absolutely requires private property. This specific criticism doesn’t render socialism “impossible” of course, but just less efficient (ok, probably astronomically less efficient) than markets. But it doesn’t stop at things which have prices; instead it extends to everything the government monopolizes (regulation, public goods, etc).
I think its an important distinction to make, because there is the possibility of more rational investments under socialism than Lange’s model. Prediction markets, for example, could be used to predict the outcome of state investments on some sort of “social welfare” function (yes, I know how silly this is, but remember these are socialists we’re arguing with).
Since a socialist doesn’t produce anything, taxes are their usual source of revenue - so that one only needs to accumulate its spending on a given project to measure that side of the equation. Back in my bean-counting / pricing days, if I got an estimate from functional engineers I would multiply it by 2.5 as a rule - since my historical tracking indicated that they tended to be off in their optimism - of what they could get done and their understanding of the scope of work they yet owned) - by 100% and then another 25% tax would need to be added to their total actuals for supervisory oversight (not overhead even) and the inefficiencies of yanking them off to do other jobs in midstream. Judging from the construction projects that end up costing 5X the initial budgets, I could imagine the purely socialist model bearing 10X or more even. So that in the long run their pay-off in social welfare would never come close to that of a competing market-determined system’s.
I guess a full out communism would have no use of money. I wonder if barter would be outlawed? It sucks that the folks at the public store don’t understand I like pepperoni’s with my green olives and beer. That pepsi, just aint refreshing with my rum. Oh maximum employment can be achieved, it just so happens to include the very young, elderly, and ill. Ya say, ya don’t like working for your fellow comrades, in the way you think it should be done, if the deprograming doesn’t strait you right up there are of course more dramatic methods. Of course the products are shotty, no one wants to tell the controllers their ideas suck, that will always end up poorly, their super inflated bubble egos just can’t handle the pressure. If ya go about takin’ away private property, the capital ends up in the hands of the real exploiters. All other folks are then not themselves, and suffering from famine. Or, is that being irrationalist, misologic, or determinist, the common methods of the subjugators/socialists.
I recall an anecdote cited by one of my econ profs - about how the USSR would give an annual recognition to the factory in each industry that outproduced the rest … and in this case it was the making of bolts measured in the cum output’s weight, so that in approaching the end of a year a particular manufacturer had a bright idea and mandated the creation of a useless bolt of obsene tonage. And needless to utter, it won! There’s command economy in a nutshell.