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Comment by Nomentatus | Hacker News Reader

Other than human nature, it had everything going for it.

The subtler arguments against socialism are not amenable to sound bites. The one that was initially penned in the 1920s and has stood the test of time the best is "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth"[1]. This kicked off the Socialist calculation debate[2] which was on-going during the 20th century. It was largely settled in favor of the anti-central planners with the collapse of communism and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in China.

[1]https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-com...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_calculation_debate

It is remarkable how little attention this gets.

Marxism has nice slogans, but very little attention is given to the details of what is the value of good quality paper clips or whatever.

The assumption of perfect knowledge and that wise central planners can beat bottom up and local knowledge is wrong. It's interesting what a common assumption it is too. Even though government and large organisation inefficiency is often remarked about.

In the same vein, very little attention is given by capitalism to the details of what is the value of things that don't have a price, like, ecosystems, or human dignity.

The assumption of perfect efficiency and that the free market magically leads to the best outcome for all is wrong. It's a very common assumption too. Even though the absurd level of inequalities or the ultra short-sighted plundering and wreaking of natural resources are often remarked about.

>Marxism has nice slogans, but very little attention is given to the details of what is the value of good quality paper clips or whatever.

Even less attention is given to those (and more important things, like the environment) by liberal capitalism. The market will sort it all out.

It really all comes down to pricing theory, right? Marxism says that labor has intrinsic economic value. That's fundamental to Marxist communist thought, from economics to social theory to theories of history.

Liberal economic theory says that there's no such thing as intrinsic economic value. See Diamond Fallacy. Optimal price signaling through a free market would be a necessary corollary. (And I think the Halting Problem could be used to prove that.)

Neither seem right to me, but Marxism definitely seems far more wrong. Nonetheless, concepts like dignity and justice wouldn't exist if labor and other activities didn't have some kind of intrinsic value, however indefinite or indeterminable. The vast majority of people in capitalist societies, especially those in ultra capitalist societies, and particularly Americans, believe in an intrinsic worth to labor. And human concepts such as dignity, justice, and "the value of human life" exist precisely to define what we perceive as intrinsic value. And perhaps that's what democracy is about--a hack bolted onto free market capitalism to aggregate (in a very poor manner) our normative assessments of different kinds of intrinsic values, and to pay those costs more optimally than capitalism alone could manage.

The truth is is that all labor is of equal COST, that being one hour of a person's time, but all labor is not of equal VALUE. Someone building a machine to do something is more valuable then the equivalent time spent doing the task by hand for example. The calculation of whether the machine should be built and then what it should be used for, especially if its function is very non-specific, such as a lathe, is where socialism gets messy and capitalism does better.

Touch of ableism here.

> Nonetheless, concepts like dignity and justice wouldn't exist if labor and other activities didn't have some kind of intrinsic value, however indefinite or indeterminable.

I think this is wrong. You're trying to derive human worth from economic value. You can't do it. (And even if you succeeded, it would be at the price of reducing humans to their economic output, which is really dehumanizing.)

If capitalism (and more merely wanting to make a profit when you can) was so great fit for human nature, one has to wonder why people were forced out of their villages, beaten, trained, enslaved in colonies, and policed, to adopt it in any large numbers. Compared to these processes, Stalin was a small-time crook.

Humans have lived and thrived without capitalist economies and with other priorities (from moral to religious and to civic duty) presiding over markets and profit for millennia.

The mere presence of commerce is not the same as capitalism (whose start is estimated at the 15th or 16th century, and it's total, often cancerous, spread over traditional communities in the 20th century).

It's a crude fit for human nature, yup; now I beg you suggest a better one. The medieval church was a pretty crude fit too, coping with unconscious motivation fairly well, encouraging innovation not so well. I think we can and will do better one day, but the socialism we have now is far too naive. I think kindness, responsibility and shrewdness about human nature might be put together in one system, but such a working system isn't clear to me, and we aren't doing much to think one up.

re "The subtler arguments against socialism are not amenable to sound bites." History is unsubtle - especially where communism is concerned. Many arguments can be put forward to discredit it, but none are really neede. There's another couple soundbites (more accurately, aphorisms) for you.

The (lack of recognition of the) unconscious mind cripples socialism. Interestingly, Christianity and Buddhism both sneak it in, in one roundabout way or another; the next social movement needs to start right there, with the unconscious mind - tackling the conundrum of our deeper motivations including sexual selection. That might be possible. Sexual selection (often aided by our unconscious) overpowers every version of socialism so far. We need a version that can cope with that extreme pressure on human action.

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