16
Feb
2019
Catching Up on Podcasts
I have been traveling a lot and I can’t remember if I posted all of these. So anyway…
The Bob Murphy Show ep. 14 is my review of The Three Lads and the Lizard King.
The BMS ep. 15 is my interview with David Gornoski, which got into some heavy-duty stuff about scapegoating.
The BMS ep. 16 is my interview with Joe Salerno, which covers some of his work in Austrian economics but also fun Rothbard anecdotes.
And the last three episodes of Contra Krugman–here, here, and here–have been pretty fun, largely because we recorded late and Tom is usually in bed by 9.
I posted a comment on BMS #16 but it didn’t come out. Not sure if you generally do want comments on that site, or if it’s just slow to get the stamp of approval.
I’ll give the gist here … I doubt that any of the big socialist nations were seriously attempting to solve the “calculation problem”. Based on what they have been documented doing, they had much more fundamental issues to deal with. Joe Salerno tries to use that as empirical proof of Mises’ conjecture, but I don’t accept that it has ever been tested in any practical way. I don’t mean along the lines of, “That wasn’t real socialism” but more from the perspective that Mises concedes so much in terms of setting up his position that it’s no longer realistic for any historical example (and IMHO not for any future example either).
Look at this another way: suppose that Mises is correct and it’s literally impossible for socialists to optimize against any set of production functions. OK, they can’t achieve the optimum but you would think that probably 80% of optimal, or there about you could do without great effort … they just make up the difference cutting luxury items (the Western nations do have a lot of luxury items in comparison). However, when you look at the observable situation … the socialists did not fall short by a little bit, they murdered millions. They had difficulty with even the most basic items. Venezuela used to grow most of their own food, but now they can’t anymore. Don’t tell me there’s some calculation difficulty that prevents the Venezuelans figuring out that growing food might be a good idea when people are starving.
Tel, I have to manually approve every comment over there, but yeah I approved yours last night I think.
whoa there.. “. OK, they can’t achieve the optimum but you would think that probably 80% of optimal, or there about you could do without great effort’.
You can’t state that at the outset and the argue from there, when no one on the other side of the debate would accept that premise as valid.
https://imgur.com/eCq0Q1v