Lionel Robbins in a 1932 essay defined "Economics" as "the science which studies human
behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have
alternative uses."
The fiasco/horror of Venezuela is stimulating all sorts of opinions. Almost none of them involve a criticism of socialism itself. Much of the emphasis is upon the government's reaction to the disaster--forced labor and the like seems to most commenters to be an unusually harsh solution. Not a lot of history majors there.
The Socialist Party of Britain gives this shorthand description of what socialism is: “free access to all goods and services.”
A guy named Tucker wrote a very interesting, simple--and maybe common, as my reading of economics is light--analysis: Socialism is rooted in a very simple error, one so fundamental that it denies a fundamental feature of the world. It denies the existence and the persistence of scarcity itself. That is to say, it denies that producing and allocating is even a problem. If you deny that, it’s hardly surprising that you have no regard for economics as a discipline of the social sciences.
So long as anything is scarce, there cannot be free, unlimited, collective access to it. Whatever it is will be over-utilized, depleted, and finally vanish following the final fight for the last scrap – sort of like what is happening in Venezuela today.
That is to say, you can’t have socialism in a scarce good or service. Instead, it has to be allocated. Things can be allocated by arbitrary decision backed by force, or they can be allocated through agreement, trading, and gifting. The forceful way is what socialism has always become. This is for a reason: socialism does not deal with reality.
Nor, if you heed Lionel Robbins, does the Socialist Party of Britain's definition of socialism overlap "economics." It is something else.
The fiasco/horror of Venezuela is stimulating all sorts of opinions. Almost none of them involve a criticism of socialism itself. Much of the emphasis is upon the government's reaction to the disaster--forced labor and the like seems to most commenters to be an unusually harsh solution. Not a lot of history majors there.
The Socialist Party of Britain gives this shorthand description of what socialism is: “free access to all goods and services.”
A guy named Tucker wrote a very interesting, simple--and maybe common, as my reading of economics is light--analysis: Socialism is rooted in a very simple error, one so fundamental that it denies a fundamental feature of the world. It denies the existence and the persistence of scarcity itself. That is to say, it denies that producing and allocating is even a problem. If you deny that, it’s hardly surprising that you have no regard for economics as a discipline of the social sciences.
So long as anything is scarce, there cannot be free, unlimited, collective access to it. Whatever it is will be over-utilized, depleted, and finally vanish following the final fight for the last scrap – sort of like what is happening in Venezuela today.
That is to say, you can’t have socialism in a scarce good or service. Instead, it has to be allocated. Things can be allocated by arbitrary decision backed by force, or they can be allocated through agreement, trading, and gifting. The forceful way is what socialism has always become. This is for a reason: socialism does not deal with reality.
Nor, if you heed Lionel Robbins, does the Socialist Party of Britain's definition of socialism overlap "economics." It is something else.
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