Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: summary of calculation debate

[Rob Schaap <carob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

G'day Michael,

You write:

>The only advantage that the entrepeneur has over the planner
>is that there are a lot of them rather than a single planner.

Well, that, according to the price-mechanism theorists is one of two
decisive differences.  The other being to do with the nature of motivation
for entrepreneurial activity.  The former could be addressed via some sort
of decentralisation of economic power (the 'infantile' left communists had
suggestions to make about this - if memory serves, Labour Commissar
Shliapnikov wanted sectorally based economic management, based on the
relevant trades unions - and Trotsky's wistful observation that the system
of soviets was too underdeveloped at the time of the revolution includes
some reference to such a system's potential for sectorally diversified
management - incidentally, Nove quotes him supporting transitional market
socialism quite expolicitly and quite often - although today's Trots
generally won't have a bar of such sentiments).  The question of motivation
gets into that great ideological divide concerning human nature (how do you
stop stuff like comfortable inertia, deceit, capture, and misled/captured
investment planners) - and that points to a powerful computer-enhanced, but
somehow democratically accountable, centre.  The question then might be one
of 'how do we stop so economically powerful a centre from gaining the
political sway to turn itself into that ol' apparat?'

What we have to remember, as many of you have, is that we're not pursuing
the optimality Mises and Hayek saw immanent in their precious
price-mechanism.  We don't see any evidence at all that it is anything like
optimality in it, and shouldn't allow ourselves to be bullied into trying to
concoct a system to match the system they claim exists.  The bar is not set
that high at all, in our benighted reality (to which Pen-pals are making too
few references, for mine), and we shouldn't be afraid of a few Campari
shortages if we can convincingly show ways of getting more grain to more
Sierra Leoniam stomachs, more AZT to more Zambian bloodstreams, and more
useful employment to more of Flint's unemployed.  I mean, when you take a
five-second peek at the world, the priorities have a way of disclosing
themselves rather starkly, no?  As for the danger of dictatorial
nomenklatura; there too our current system does not offer any real
alternative - they're just hidden behind tendentious definitions of freedom
and democracy, is all.

Let's change our point of view to thinkable structures and mechanisms to fix
a few things that press today, rather than (as perhaps we're inclined to do
as our particular and enviable beings mess around with our consciousnesses)
build these castles in the air.

Cheers,
Rob.