Anybody who is keen enough can detect the Marxist agenda of this article. He refers to Elinor Ostrom’s work, which I am not familiar with, and perhaps he is misrepresenting her work , I just don’t know. But the article itself is a complete fallacy in terms of the message that it tries to deliver.
I am all open to other opinions and challenging point of views, but this is a disgrace to FEE. The author is a clear economic ignoramus, see some of his comments below the article. He compares Joint stock companies to Market Socialism! What is going on? Have they been receiving monetary contributions from Marxists?
Modified LTV, with Austrian insights, but actually reading his stuff is too much work, I guess. If you’re going to disagree with him (I do as well, in case you feel the need to get defensive), do it better next time.
Modified LTV, with Austrian insights, but actually reading his stuff is too much work, I guess. If you’re going to disagree with him (I do as well, in case you feel the need to get defensive), do it better next time.
Having read his theory, it looks like a bunch of incoherent bad economics (making him the second major Austrian crank, after George Reisman) and obsessive harping about his particular pet moralisms, none of which (when they are true) are remotely original with him (even within the Austrian school).
Perhaps. The main reason I’ve read into him is to get better arguments against leftists, & also to utilize it as “bait” towards alternative economic & political thought.
I think without all of his moralism, though, he might find some common ground with distributists & the new right (to generalize a bit, albiet). I would not be surprised if I found him less interesting whenever I get into reading some heavy Austrian econ texts, though.
In any case, it irks me that such a generalization occurs, even if I agree with disagreeing with Carson. It reminds me of the Tea Partiers proclaiming socialism to Obama, when even Ron Paul rebuked this by correctly calling him a Corporatist.
I think without all of his moralism, though, he might find some common ground with distributists & the new right (to generalize a bit, albiet).
Be that as it may, the redoubtable New Right would also find much in common with Gabriel Kolko, who has made (in more detail) basically every valid claim Carson has, without either resorting to a ‘labor theory of value’ or claiming himself to be an Austrian economist.
I would not be surprised if I found him less interesting whenever I get into reading some heavy Austrian econ texts, though.
I can not recommend too strongly reading both Human Action and Mises’ three books on epistemology and methodology in economics. Though I disagree with him in some of his Neo-Kantian framework and dispute a handful of his economics, Mises is one of the few authors I have ever read whose writing is at the same time broad, incredibly powerful and almost never wrong.
Ostrom merely shows that the so called “tragedy of the commons” is not, in anyway, an inevitable condition of shared property. Social rules will emerge, independent of government decrees/interventionism, which limit the over-usage of depletable and shared resources (spontaneous order). Statists have used game theory to show that the problem of the commons is an unavoidable condition/market failure, which requires immediate government intervention. In fact, this was the rationale used by Roosevelt in the 30s for controlling oil and agricultural industries. Of course, her argument only makes makes sense at the micro level; common property ownership, at the macro level, is both entirely unnecessary and impossible.
She’s not saying that private property is an inefficient social institution; all she’s saying is that in those rare (unavoidable) circumstances, where property is not clearly defined, social arrangements will emerge and prevent Pareto inefficient outcomes. Essentially, her work is agreeable to anarchists, of all sorts.
Carson’s comparison of the emergent governance in common properties from voluntary individual interaction (Ostrom) to the economic illiteracy of top-down “market socialism” is silly, but the former point is good. There are situations in which individual private property is impractical, suboptimal, or impossible. We deal with commons problems all the time - from families to roommates to community parks to roads and so on. Ostrom’s work is a sound answer to the New Institutional economists who argue that all externalities must be internalized through individualized property rights. And that’s a good thing because statists can easily point out that some property is not practically or possibly individualized - air, ocean, etc.
What do you have against George Reisman? (Serious question.)
His major project, the attempt to integrate cost-of-production classical theories (as well as the related attempt to replace marginal productivity in pricing of wage factors), his bizarre denial of opportunity costs, his ridiculous notion of ‘wealth’ as an ‘objective value’ as the object of economics (as opposed to subjective preferences’, his attempt to fuse the logically and epistemically incoherent Objectivist Pulp Philosophy with Austrian and Classical economics - oh, and his conviction that Google is out to censor him.
The man is 1) not a good economist; 2) a Randoid; 3) full of outlandish conspiracy theories and totally unrealistic views of society and 4) completely crazy.
In other words, he belongs on the Mises.org forum.
Your screechings about people at this forum leaves me wondering whether you find people here worse than elsewhere or whether you simply hate everyone everywhere.
Your screechings about people at this forum leaves me wondering whether you find people here worse than elsewhere or whether you simply hate everyone everywhere.
I hate almost everyone everywhere (when I am not utterly indifferent); I do like some of the people on this forum but, as a rule, they also tend to hate most of you. They just aren’t as belligerant about it as I am.
That’s a baseless assertion that is just accepted by most people but like everything else, is totally false.
Odd choice of examples
All of the above are economic goods and there are no special laws of economics for the goods above, as oppose to food, shoes, cloths, and iPhones. All of the above can be, and were at some point in the past, privately owned.
"the emergent governance in common properties from voluntary individual interaction (Ostrom) "
Again, I’m not familiar with Ostrom, however, by no means does this imply that such type of “ownership” is a third way. By this logic, collectivist tribal economics is also a viable third system, since it has existed in the past for thousands of years.
When we are saying that that there is no alternative to private property, we are referring to a modern industrial complex society. Not tribesman running around naked fishing with their bare hands.