[PEN-L:8667] Re: market socialism, planned socialism, ut

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

Robin,
     'Fraid so.  Actually in the old USSR they had labor 
markets.  If someone wanted to quit a job and work 
somewhere else, they could, subject to restrictions on 
migration (the "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" 
syndrome).  Only if people are assigned a job and can't 
quit, a la the PRC under Mao, does one not have a labor 
market to some degree.  And, of course, there is outright 
slavery, although that is a "labor market" of a different 
kind.
     I guess what you are talking about is the "labor 
market" setting wages.  But in the kind of worker-managed 
market socialism that a lot of us find attractive, wages 
are set by the workers in the enterprise themselves, 
subject to the prices they are getting for their output.
     As for your later post, I see nothing wrong with 
further equalization being carried out by some combination 
of progressive taxation and directed public spending.  You 
cite Sweden with some dissatisfaction as not coming near 
enough to economic justice for you.  What is your model 
then?  To each according to his/her need?  Absolute 
equality?  Rawlsian maximin?  I note that these are 
not equivalent to each other.
     BTW, if there is political support for any kind of 
more or less socialist solution, I see no reason why there 
would not also be support for such equalizing policies as 
progressive taxation and directed public spending.
     As for externalities, clearly there has to be some 
mechanism, possibly even a market one as in marketable 
permits, established or run outright by the state.  I note 
that the historical record of the actually planned 
economies on externalities was downright awful.  Arguably 
this was due to the lack of participatory input and perhaps 
your scheme would solve that unfortunate lacuna.
Barkley Rosser 
On Sat, 15 Feb 1997 11:29:33 -0800 (PST) Robin Hahnel 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


> Barkley, are you going to use labor markets? If so, you will get highly
> unequal labor incomes that are also quite inequitable. Michael Jordan will
> get $20 million per year and a nursery school teacher will get $20 thousand.
> If you don't permit labor markets to determine labor income, they you will
> have wage rates that certainly do NOT represent marginal revenue products
> and accurate social opportunity costs. But then the labor component of the
> costs of items will not reflect social opportunity costs of items. So,
> equity and efficiency are fundamentally at odds in market socialist
> economies.
> 
> And no, markets do NOT provide what people want. In a trivial sense they
> do. If one seller of shoes is making ugly ones and another is making
> attractive ones, the market will pressure the former to adapt or depart.
> But in a much more important sense markets mis-price goods because of
> extensive external effects, and provide incentives for profit maximizers
> to externalize costs as much as it provides them incentives to improve
> product quality.
> 
> And then there is the problem that the behavioral roles that markets
> force us to play are hardly the kind of lesson we hope our children
> learn in play school -- that is equitable cooperation -- rather than
> advancing our own interests at the expense of others.

-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]