(Part 2) Best products from r/CapitalismVSocialism

If I was going to provide someone with a list of books that best expressed my current thinking on the Political Economy these would be my top ones:

1. The Law - While over a century old this books stands as the perfect intro to the ideas of Classical Liberalism. When you understand the core message of this book you understand why people oppose so many aspects of government action.
   
2. Seeing Like A State - The idea that society can be rebuilt from the top down is well demolished in this dense but important read. The concept of Legibility was a game changer for my brain.
   
3. Stubborn Attachments - This books presents a compelling philosophical argument for the importance of economic growth. It's hard to overstate how important getting the balance of economic growth vs other considerations actually is.
   
4. The Breakdown of Nations - A classic text on why the trend toward "bigger" isn't a good thing. While various nits can be picked with this book I think its general thesis is holding up well in our increasingly bifurcated age.
   
5. The Joy of Freedom - Lots of books, many objectively better, could have gone here but this book was my personal pivot point which sent me away from Socialism and towards capitalism. This introduction to "Libertarian Capitalism" is a bit dated now but it was powerful.
   
   There are, of course many more books that could go on this list. But the above list is a good sampling of my personal philosophy of political economy. It is not meant as a list of books to change your mind but simply as a list of books that are descriptive of my current belief that we should be orientated towards high (sustainable) economic growth & more decentralization.
   
   Some honorable mentions:
   
   As a self proclaimed "Libertarian Crunchy Con" I have to add The Quest for Community & Crunchy Cons
   
   The book The Fourth Economy fundamentally changed my professional direction in life.
   
   Anti-Fragile was another book full of mind blowing ideas and shifted my approach to many things.
   
   The End of Jobs is a great combination of The Fourth Economy & Anti-Fragile (among other concepts) into a more real-world useful set of ideas.
   
   Markets Not Capitalism is a powerful reminder that it is not Capitalism per se that is important but the transformational power of markets that need be unleashed.
   
   You will note that I left out pure economic books, this was on purpose. There are tons of good intro to econ type books and any non-trained economist should read a bunch from a bunch of different perspectives. With that said I am currently working my way through the book Choice and if it stays as good as it has started that will probably get added to my core list.
   
   So many more I could I list like The Left, The Right, & The State or The Problem of Political Authority and on it goes...
   I am still looking for a "manifesto" of sorts for the broad movement towards decentralization (I have a few possibilities on my 'to read list') so if you know of any that might fit that description let me know.

> As I mentioned above, I'm looking for sources on this. The last time I had this thought was literally a decade or more ago, when my research was not detailed, but suggested that most wealthy, especially ultra-wealthy, has massive productive investments. I would think that those who don't get to watch their wealth get slowly eaten away by inflation and consumption, which, well, should happen to rich people who don't help society.

I understand, but that's not what I'm arguing.

> Do you know how these help society?

Because 'most' (hence not all) of what goes on in the financial sector is an overhead on GDP. I'd look into the brilliant work and research done by Michael Hudson on the financial economy.

> I'm agreeing with the morals here, but I can't agree with the execution. You've got someone who has successfully built businesses, you don't want arbitrary government rules deciding how to spend their money. Their wealth is a proven positive track record, and you don't want to disrupt that.

Yeah, but implicit in that statement are half a dozen moral assumptions that I may or may not share. The notion that a successful business was built solely and purely off their back is one of them. The notion of government rules as arbitrary is another. The notion of what constitutes a proven track record is another.

Enlightenment:

Broadly speaking, the Enlightenment is the ideology that asserts all people should be set free, and so all progressive, humanist, and libertarian ideologies are implicitly Enlightenment ideologies. It's a good thing. In practice, the Enlightenment was the radical ideology espoused by the rising bourgeois as they toppled feudal regimes across Europe from 1789-1848. Socialism has its roots in the most radical forms of Enlightenment thought.

French Revolution:

The political revolution that united the French bourgeois with the starving peasantry against the Feudal aristocracy that had become obscenely slothful and decadent. It was a good thing. Many modern political ideologies, both left and right, can trace their roots back to the various factions vying for power during the turbulent years following the fall of the Bastille (speaking of which--happy belated Bastille day everyone).

Rise of capitalism:

It was a good thing for the rising middle class, a bad thing for the feudal aristocracy and the mass of peasantry. It was good for European nation-states, bad for most everyone else. In terms of historical significance, I agree with Communist historian Eric Hobsbawm--that the rise of capitalism is probably the most important event in human history, at least since the invention of agriculture and the establishment of the first cities (link):

> Some time in the 1780s, and for the first time in human history, the shackles were taken off the productive power of human societies, which henceforth became capable of the constant, rapid, and up to the present limitless multiplication of men, goods and services. This is now technically known to the economists as the 'take-off into self-sustained growth' ... for it was then that, so far as we can tell, all the relevant statistical indices took that sudden, sharp, almost vertical turn upwards. ... The economy became, as it were, airborne.

Production Values = 10

Lyrical Meter = 8

Historical accuracy = 3.4

It's telling that the Mont Perelin society still pushes this narrative as if Ludvig Von ("The Merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history") Mises was taken seriously in his day or since.

Marx is like a welterweight runner-up and Von Mises is still trying to auction off his sweaty towels. Marx indirectly launched the Russian Revolution. Von Mises got a part-time job at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce.

But yeah totally, sure, the "Marginal Revolution" was a real revolution and not at all far-right historical revisionism.

"In 1820 everyone was poor". It's scary how good these lyricists are at presenting just how deluded conservatives really are. As if those famines were gonna hit any day now. real history suggest otherwise

> Does the development of increasingly sophisticated institutional organizational structure within such movements happen to all human institutions whatsoever?

Yes.

> What implications does this have for the capitalism vs socialism debate?

A lot. The long term implications for increasing complexity in social institutions are dire. The most authoritative work I'm aware of on this topic is Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies. The TL;DR is that complexity offers diminishing returns as it scales upward. But scale upward it must; with the necessity to handle complexity better than your competitors (effectively an organizational "arms race"), you've got a recipe for cyclical history.

Neither socialism nor capitalism escapes this problem. However the two have proven variously effective by the way they handle complexity. Capitalism, unafraid of hierarchy, is able to handle it via the mechanism of emergent or spontaneous order which is more in keeping with the way complex systems self-regulate in the natural world. Socialism on the other hand, (wherever and to whatever extent it has been attempted) typically reverts to an ad hoc and hastily cobbled together imposed order when its egalitarianism proves fractious, destabilizing, and unworkable.

EDIT: In case it's of interest, there's a school of thought ("neoreaction") which has spilled alot of virtual ink on the idea of building governance and information structures in parallel to those representing power. See: the true election and the antiversity and the plinth.

Come on man, what is this!

It has been a nice conversation, why do you start insulting?

No need to do it if you have good arguments.

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>So "good" that people are forced to pay for them against their will even when they won't use them. In other words not good at all. Good things survive on their own merits and not through force.

We were talking about economic performances, not moral issues. This isn't the place to talk about moral judgement about socialism and capitalism. I didn't talk about morality because we are discussing something really different, how well the public sector can achieve its goals.

Out of context.

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>What I pointed out was that it's economic problems were due to the ECP which you haven't refuted.

I explained why in a synthetic way because it's a complex issue. The USSR had a dysfunctional dictatorship that was against any change of the status quo of their material balance planning, that led to stagnation. It was a system that was created for an underdevolped country with the need to develop capital intensive technologies. Look at what the great Polish economist Michal Kalecki had to say about that. Great soviet economists like Leontief advanced solutions, also Kornai and the Nobel laureate Kantorovich introduced linear programming models to change planning algorithms. The lack of clear knowledge caused by the dictatorship played also a role obviously: if the law is really harsh against dissent, economic planning can't work well.

However, Soviet politician didn't follow them. They made really bad decisions during the cold war, with a great focus on capital intensive military technologies and not on consumption. The Perestroika and the destruction of the tissue of Soviet society did the rest.

This is really synthetic. The book that I linked you above is good if you want to know more.

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>No, we can't, because this is how you get shortages. People do respond to changes in prices which is why we don't have such shortages in market systems.

I mean, just read what I wrote until now to have a reply to this. It's like you forgot all the discussion.

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>No it isn't. This is you going full retard and where I'm done with this conversation. You lost here.

Professor Anwar Shaikh wrote a great book that can explain better why the general equilibrium theory and in general the neoclassical model fail. Here.

Actually you don't need to go deep in heterodox economics, criticism of neoclassical model are really common.

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I hope that you'll reconsider your decision, otherwise thanks for the discussion.

The Labor Theory of Value (LTV) precedes Karl Marx. It was the dominant theory of classical political economy. Both Adam Smith and David Ricardo adhered to it. Leftwing Ricardians built a defense of socialism out of it. Marxists debate the extent to which Marx was a critic of these leftwing Ricardians and the extent to which he was largely a leftwing Ricardian himself.

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The fact that Smith and Ricardo were also associated with this theory should tip you off that it is not as dumb of a theory as you are making it out to be. Ricardo thought the prices of different commodities could be explained in terms of the amount of labor that went into making them. That's what the LTV meant; it did not mean that "labor [is] inherently valuable." The idea that prices are determined by the quantity of labor required to make them shouldn't strike one as dumb as labor is a big input in determining price. Marx modifies Ricardo's theory in the opening pages of Capital, Vol 1, but the role of the LTV in Marx's writings (whether anything important for Marx hinges on it) and whether Marx's version of the LTV holds up is debated among contemporary Marxists. One recent scholarly text defending Marx's LTV is Anwar Shaikh's Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises published by the University of Oxford Press. If this is just meaningless, it's rather odd that Oxford UP chose to publish 900+ pages of gibberish. Some other Marxists (Michael Heinrich) think Marx broke with the LTV . Others think that most of Marx's analysis is not wedded to the LTV and so could be re-phrased using the rhetoric of neoclassical economics.

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Regardless, anyone who read even a page or two of Capital should notice that the basic idea that consumers value stuff is incorporated into Marx's version of the LTV. There Marx writes, "the commodity produced by its owner’s labour must above all be a use-value for the owner of the money [who buys the commodity]. The labour expended on it must therefore be of a socially useful kind.... Let us suppose, finally, that every piece of linen on the market contains nothing but socially necessary labour-time. In spite of this, all these pieces taken as a whole may contain superfluously expended labour-time. If the market cannot stomach the whole quantity at the normal price of 2 shillings a yard, this proves that too great a portion of the total social labour-time has been expended in the form of weaving. The effect is the same as if each individual weaver had expended more labour-time on his particular product than was socially necessary." Value is objective in the sense that there is a definite quantity of labor time that goes into making it; it is subjective in so far as it is "socially necessary" and is thus "useful" for others.

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As I read him, Marx is not arguing that all labor is valuable, nor does he believe in "labor value" (whatever that is), nor does he say that capitalists "rob" workers. Rather, he argues that in order to make a profit, capitalists must discipline workers, and in order to be disciplined, workers must be vulnerable. Capitalism, therefore, requires a vulnerable labor force.

Theres a lot of modern marxist books.

https://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Competition-Conflict-Anwar-Shaikh/dp/0199390630