this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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Empirical response: How did the soviet economy grow 50 percent during the Great depression?
Theory based response: when you remove profit seeking workers are no longer alienated from their labor, as the harder they work the more it benefits them and their community and not some rich fuck.
If I'm working a job now, what incentive do I have to be as productive as possible? The potential for promotion? If I wanted to optimize my chances for that, I'd be more interested in learning to be a kissass than to improve my work.
Price is a very low information density signal. It isnt actually rational to do economic planning (as all firms do in market economies) off of price, why do you think non-hostile corporate espionage is a thing?
Remember that growth is relative. GDP per capita in the mid 30s was still three times higher in countries like the states, UK, and Switzerland compared to the Soviet Union. This trend continued into the next decades. Pretty much all of Europe had a stronger economy. And there weren’t mass famines and rampant scarcity issues to the same extent in the west. Yes the Soviet economy did grow, but the libertarian argument is about efficiency.
And sure, price in isolation isn’t a super useful indicator. But many factors influence price (competition from profit seeking, availability of resources, etc). As for the latter part, companies do run market research, including non hostile espionage, to find what consumers want most. I personally don’t see where that would be irrational. It directly fills needs.
And how did that pan out for high GDP France? GDP per capita is a bad statistic to use. Two economists trading a random object and 20 dollars back and forth raises the GDP of a place by forty dollars per cycle
Thats because they exported their economic problems to the colonies. Look up how many people starved to death In British colonial India. Also the soviet union ended the previously periodic famines when their collectivization policy was fully implemented
What sort of efficiency? Because Marxists argue that capitalism is really good at making profit and really bad comparatively at efficiently improving human outcomes.
That is literally why it has low information value.
Those were economic policies that had brutal real world effects, and the Opium Wars were absolutely shameful, especially because the British did it twice. Do non-capitalist systems also have any sort of incentive for colonialism and all the nasties that come with it, like slavery?