[ExI] Strong libertarianism, societal good, & suffering (was: Cephalization, proles)

[Damien Sullivan]

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 02:14:39PM +0200, Stefano Vaj wrote:

> This is an interesting angle. In fact, planned economy partisans (eg,
> in the Kruscev era) believed to have a drastic edge in the medium-long
> term over market economy because it could in their expectations spare
> the waste, directly adopt ideal solutions and scale economies, and
> reduce reaction times to change.
> 
> Conversely, this opens the way to the idea that this need not be true
> forever. So that from a societal point of view a fully planned economy
> may actually end up being more efficient as long as as it is based on
> computational resources that do beat the massively parallel, but
> indeed slow, processing performed by the market.

Of course, "planned economy that sets prices" vs. "free market" is a
false dichotomy.  Taxes and subsidies for externalities don't set
prices, they adjust prices, to help the market account for costs and
benefits.

-xx- Damien X-)