Topic: Socialism

Quotes

Don Lavoie, Rivalry and Central Planning (1985)

• The question [of market socialism] is no longer whether a nonrivalrous conscious plan can supplant the coordinating function of rivalrous competition among private owners but the related question of whether rivalrous competition can perform its function when the competitors are not private owners.#
• A basic problem with marginal cost rules is that they depend on costs being objectively known, whereas when property is privately held, costs are estimates that are “verified” only by the earning of profits. Thus there is a fundamental difference between, on the one hand, the tendency for producers, impelled by competitive profit seeking, to equate price to marginal cost and on the other the explicit instruction to directly attain this marginal “cost equals price” result.#
• The labor theory approach essentially reduces all scarcities to scarcity of labor time, but the practical task before the central planners is to husband all scarce goods.#

Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (1850)

• Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.#

Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1907)

• Undoubtedly, socialism is directed towards a rationalization of life, towards control of life’s chance and unique elements by the law-like regularities and calculations of reason. At the same time, socialism has affinities with the hollow communistic instincts that, as the residue of times long since past, still lie in the remote corners of the soul. Socialism’s dual motivations have diametrically opposed psychic roots. On the one hand, socialism is the final developmental product of the rationalistic money economy, and on the other it is the embodiment of the most basic instincts and emotions. The distinguishing feature of its power of attraction lies in rationalism as well as a reaction to rationalism.#
• What separates Nietzsche from all socialist evaluations is most distinctly characterized by the fact that, for him, only the quality of mankind has any significance, so that a single highest example determines the value of an era, whereas for socialism only the degree of diffusion of desirable conditions and values is relevant.#