Re: market "socialism," etc.

["Ricardo Duchesne" <rduchesn@xxxxxxxx>]

Not tyring to spoil the party (I agree this was a good post - the sort
of stuff I am sure penners would read more if only they had not
wasted their time finding them in the pile of  shabby responses
which pollute this place when there's a heated debate) but I have to
take issue with the comment below, not because I want to pretend
I know something about the Austrians (except what I thought I had
to learn as a TA for Henryk Flakierski, the one Paul had in mind
from York):
>
> The "Austrian" theory of competition is derivative from Marx and the
> classicals. I'm pretty sure that Bohm-Bawerk developed most of his stuff in
> response to Marx, while appropriating the parts of Marx he liked (e.g., the
> dynamic vision of competition).

But here's Schumpeter himself, the one Austrian who was closest
to Marx: For Marx the capitalist economy "is incessantly being
revolutionized from within by new enterprise, i.e., by the intrusion of
new commodities or new methods of production or new commercial
opportunities into the industrial structure [...] This is how progress
comes about in capitalist society. In order to escape being
undersold, every firm is in the end compelled to follow suit, to
invest in its turn and, in order to be able to do so, to plow back part
of its profits, i.e., to accumulate. Thus, everyone else accumulates.
Now Marx saw this process of industrial change more clearly...than
any other economist of his time. This does not mean that he
correctly understood its nature or correctly analyzed its
mechanism. With him, *that mechanism resolves itself into mere
mechanics of masses of capital. He had no adequate theory of
enterprise and his failure to distinguish the entrepreneur from the
capitalist*, together with a faulty theoretical technique, accounts for
many cases of non sequitur and for many mistakes"

When S says no adequate theory of enterprise he means that M
had no adequate theory of rational behavior. Marx has no concept
of rational action, his 'rational miser' is a mere personification of the
capitalist system.