axeil posted:

x-posting my thoughts as well:

As much as I hate the Austrians they did do one good thing: and that is to definitively prove a planned economy (whether coming from the fascist angle or the communist angle) can never be as efficient as a market-driven system.

They showed empirically that the countries using command-style economies were, on the whole, only using their resources about 76% as efficiently as non-communist countries.


Of course, classical capitalism only cares about market efficiency and nothing about equality so you need some mechanisms in place to ensure that.

It pisses off the ideologues to no end, but the "best" (i.e system that most effectively balances economic efficiency against preferred societal outcomes like equality) economic system is some mixture of command and market economy...kind of like what most of the world practices. 100% market and 100% command economies really don't exist anymore. The main quibble these days is how do you best balance things which gets into a whole discussion of the inherent value of things and Trolley Problems and what not.

tl;dr: pure communism is doomed to failure just like pure capitalism because it they are too pure and highly "pure" economic systems end up not optimizing for things we care about (efficiency vs equality to be simplistic)