Re: Market socialism -- summing up?

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> JKSCHW@xxxxxxx 07/17/00 02:35PM >>>The basic reason I have been urging is the calculation problem, which Rob dismisses as "not theoretically deep" because it is "merely empirical." I guess this shows a divide so great between our conceptions of theoretical explanation that I do not think it can be bridged. I am a pragmatist, and think all our theories are empirical and revisable, provisional and practically tested. Rob complains that Hayek didn't back up his theory with empirical studies. Well, he wasn't that sort of economist. But thetheory is powerfully confirmed empirically: the Soviet Union is now 'former" and it failed on its own terms for more or less the reasons Hayek said it would. So far, Hayek 1, Marx O--not that the fSU embodied Marx's ideals, but (as a number of people here have said), nothing has so far. Hayek might suggest that there is an explantion for that.

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CB: This is false. The Soviet Union didn't fail because it had economic planning. It failed because capitalism has the biggest war machine in the history of humanity and used it to perpetrate the biggest war and most deadly threat of war on the SU. So, the fall of the SU does not empirically confirm Hayek.