Markets, therefore, have a big place in socialism – not least because, as Adam Smith said, they are a means whereby people provide for others without caring. (The best counter-argument to this I’ve seen comes from Matthijs Krul).
This principle has another implication. Socialism should be achieved by evolution, by creating stepping stones – small institutional tweaks that create the potential for bigger ones. For example, small acts of empowering people – such as worker directors or patients’ groups – might create a demand for greater power.
Pointer from Mark Thoma. What Dillow appears to want strikes me as a form of capitalism that is tweaked to make competition less intense among low-skilled workers and more intense among employers. I can heartily endorse the thrust of what he is proposing as much better than what we have currently.
What Dillow appears to want strikes me as a form of capitalism that is tweaked to make competition less intense among low-skilled workers and more intense among employers:
1) That description sounds a lot like the 1950 – 1960s economy with working class workers did receive substantial wage increases. However, how do create the 1950s economy when the system broke down in the 1970s by Japan?
2) Much like the libertarian dream of companies merging with local governments, employee owned companies are some kind of liberal supply side dream and I don’t see a stable solution. (This works for smaller more local companies but not a national one.)
3) The system is close to the current German economy. It is working in The Great Recession but I remember in 2000 when Germany felt like it lagging behind the dynamic US economy.
4) In a very weird way in 2016 with falling working populations and increased wages from BRIC nations, I wonder if companies are going to have to be aggressive with current tightness of the labor market. (see Conor Sen for thoughts.) Our office is competing for young talent and the treatment of workers is better than the 1990s or 2000s.
The possibility of precise meaning of all our political labels continues to deteriorate. Rival intellectuals want these terms to be popular or unpopular, to raise or lower the reflexive impression of status, and so they attach or detach attributes and create ambiguity to the point where no one can have a meaningful conversion.
Anyway, the rest of his post is typical leftist claptrap out of which any potential tolerance of the results of market activity sticks out like a sore thumb.
The devil is always in the details, about which he prevaricates. The trouble is that in any political-economic system that passes over the threshold from mixed, redistributive, regulated market economy “new New Deal” to. ‘Socialism’, market outcomes are never tolerable if they ever conflict with socialist principles. Which they inevitably will if the goal is something as fundamentally impossible as a ‘envy-free’ society. Which causes the state to make one centrally planned intervention after another until what is left is only a surface imitation of a market system, which can no longer operate in a matter adequate to fulfill its functions and purposes.
Venezuela tolerated ‘markets’ right, but less and less free ones until the point of total collapse of the ordinary systems of trade and distribution.
That ‘best case’ Dillow links to takes for granted an assertion of a “… lack of statistical evidence proving the superior efficiency of market capitalist societies over those of the former Soviet bloc.”
Please. These erroneous ideas are a true scourge on any people unlucky enough to live under a state taking them seriously.
I’m not so certain that a freer form of market capitalism than we have now would not be a worse scourge on low-skilled employees. I mean, long-live free market capitalism, open borders, and all, and great for the comparative gains and improved living conditions for less fortunate folks elsewhere in the world, but for low-skilled employees hereabouts that have just been priced out of the world-wide labor market, I’m not sure that provides such great comfort or stress-free environment for their families in the short run.
Underlying Dillow’s “My Socialism” is a concept quite common to all ideas of constructed social orders; to-wit: social orders OUGHT to be “purposive;” which requires that their members have required common purposes, or, at least, subordinate individual objectives to some common purpose for the social order.
Experience has shown this results in the development of governmental purposes displacing governmental functions in the relationships of the individual members.
That concept (priority of purpose) changes and commonly displaces the functions of the relationships amongst the members of a social order.
Those social orders which appear to have advanced furthest (lower violence, enrichments, preserved knowledge, etc.) tend to display relationships in which purposes and objectives of individuals, cooperating or contesting with other individuals, have priorities in human activities.
Isn’t Dillow just suggesting the Fabian’s approach to getting Socialism?
There are trade-offs in making institutional arrangements more like that and I suspect we are already on the wrong side of that laffer curve.