Coercive transfers are wasteful, inefficient, and inequitable. The Left uses Demand-Side Dogma to instill false legitimacy into these policies, writes D.W. MacKenzie. The Right, including the Bush administration, plays along with this rhetoric all too often.
Noam Chomsky is an outstanding critic. But figuring out what he is for in the realm of economics is not easy. He doesn't like what we have now. He disfavors Stalinism and fascism. He despises the libertarian alternative to the present regime. That leaves him with a hazy and unworkable syndicalism.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union ceased to exist two years later, many western commentators optimistically declared that socialism had fallen with those two entities. However, as we limp from one economic morass into another, it has become clear that the dream of socialism is far from dead.
It is possible for mainstream equilibrium economics to yield correct conclusions about the market system. But this is not a reliable approach, writes D.W. MacKenzie. The mathematical models of mainstream economics divert our attention from the processes and institutions that enable free and prosperous societies to exist and persist.
Gore's remarks come at a curious time, his party having suffered some terrible electoral defeats in the last election cycle. A proposal to create a Canadian-like system in Oregon was defeated 80-20 at the polls. Yet there are reasons why the socialist idea remains popular.
Those who have written in favor of distributism on moral grounds appear to revel in their ignorance of economics--as if a discipline devoted to the application of human reason to the problems of scarcity in the world could actually in itself be antagonistic to ethics and faith.
Professor Desai has given us two books in one: a new interpretation of Marxism, and a history of twentieth-century capitalism. I propose to concentrate, with one exception, on the first of these
The statement given by the Bush administration to Congress and now available online, entitled "The National Security Strategy of the United States," must be read to be believed, writes Joseph Stromberg. Its historical points are dubious, its economics misleading, and its social theory a heap of dangerous half- or third-truths.
The Socialist Calculation Debate did not end with the fall of the communist systems of the former U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe, writes William Anderson. Socialism is alive and well today, and is still wreaking havoc wherever it is implemented. But there is an intellectual antidote to socialism: Austrian economics.
