Can you elaborate? Capitalism to me (its not the definition, I'm extrapolating from linguistics) is an evolution of price coordinated markets; in a price coordinated market individuals respond to the price signals they receive to perform economic calculation (at every level) to acquire value (subjectively), since all transactions are voluntary every individual necessarily increases their own subjective value with every transaction, and behavior self coordinates around the prices available to them; capitalism stretches this concept into the realm of finance, unlocking the role of capitalists who perform these calculations at scale and provide advanced financial instruments like lending and futures.
Communism is premised on the labor theory of value, where the effort involved (mindfully tasked, a point overlooked by critics but also equally easy to refute) determines the value of a good. Of course, who measures this? If you stopped there, you could say its not that different from praxeological economics (aka Austrian) but Marx did not stop, he described the 10 tenents of communism to include things like central banking; so its fairly clear that Marx felt centralized institutions should determine the value of a good (price controls), which is how it turned out anyways without the basis of subjective value theorem to allow individual participants to negotiate prices. If you start with the number of discrete goods (~25 million in the USSR), multiply that by the quantity desired (do you want 1 loaf of bread or 1000), the medium (delivery van or cargo ship), packaging (individually wrapped or in a box) etc., you get an incalculable number of prices. Every price control will cause either a surplus (floor price too high) or shortage (roof price too low), of which the USSR had many. Calculating the near infinite number of prices proved too difficult for a few thousand bureaucrats in Moscow.
/ Geist
npub1u3…g0nsw
2023-08-15 23:31:56
in reply to nevent1q…rm4f
Author Public Key
npub1u3ud495fjw9xf0lfjezu4l2rvkccn58dyr9w9e8f4jkr3xz590nqtg0nswPublished at
2023-08-15 23:31:56Event JSON
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