The madness is really that there are still people who believe that scarce economic resources should be allocated purely according to their "labour content", rather than according to a credit-earning system based on criteria of what currently best meets human requirements in society.
Accounting is only a tool, to ensure that resources are economized in an effective and efficient manner, not itself a normative principle for resource allocation. Accounting becomes ideological, when it no longer records the real situation, but the relationship between the real situation and a normative principle. Any system of resource allocation (reciprocation redistribution, market-exchanges...) to be efficient assumes that people will co-operate with it and work with it. They will cooperate only if they have an interest in doing so, or if they are forced to do so. But if they fail to transmit the correct information, then however ingeniously the planning technique is designed, and whatever the built-in safeguards against bureaucratic abuse, the allocation system fails. The exceptional foolishness of many socialists is to insist that there can be only one allocative principle that rules all resource allocation in the economy, when this is not even true in capitalist society! Jurriaan _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
