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On the Emergence of de facto Private Property under Social Ownership

 *Note: this is a repost from an earlier, defunct blog of mine.   Part 1. The Emergence of Private Property   “Social ownership” is often posited as an alternative system of property to the private property-based system that exists in most of the world today. It is apparently believed that the abolition of legal private property is the necessary and sufficient condition for the creation of a non-capitalist society. However, I will argue here that de facto private ownership and markets can emerge in land, natural resources, other capital, and surpluses, absent any legal enforcement of extrapersonal property, purely as a result of legal recognition of self-ownership (that is, the absence of coercion on individuals), even under a system of social ownership. I will show that this is the case even if we assume inalienability of one's decisions. I will also argue that the emergence of a market economy in such a 'socialist' (based on 'social' ownership of the extern
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Firms and Incentives under Socialism

 *Note: this is a repost from an earlier defunct blog of mine that I'm posting here for 'archival' reasons. In my last post, I made the case against the heuristic 'market socialist' pricing mechanism that Fred Taylor and other market socialists have argued could salvage socialism from the inherent impossibility of the rational allocation of resources. One aspect of market socialist theory, however, I left mostly unaddressed, and that's the socialist theory of firms. I referred, at the end of my post, to the problems of incentives under a socialist arrangement, and a future post on the matter; this is that post. I associate most of the 'incentives questions' relating to socialism with the definition of the firm, its ownership, and the relative status of its participants. In particular, I think the Coasean theory of the firm is the best model for firms, is the most consistent with observed reality, and ultimately vindicates the free market approach to firm
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Central Planning and Heuristic Pricing

 *Note: I'm reposting this and maybe a few other posts from an earlier defunct blog of mine for 'archival' reasons. My interests have led me to begin reading various works in the area of socialist economic theory (and to some extent economic practice), and this has spurred a great deal of thinking on my part about the topic. As such, I will be writing a series of posts on related subjects I've recently been reading or thinking about. Today, we will be revisiting the socialist calculation debate that emerged in the 1920s; more specifically, the most robust argument made by proponents of central planning and the public ownership of factors of production: Fred Taylor's proposed 'trial and error' approach to pricing goods and services (Taylor, 1929). Some socialists have argued that Taylor's proposed mechanism was never really refuted by the Mises or Hayek during the original discourse. Jossa and Cuomo (1997), for example, argue that Hayek mistakenly believe
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Did Peter Turchin predict 2020?

 Peter Turchin, along with Jack Goldstone, claims in an article in Noema (https://www.noemamag.com/welcome-to-the-turbulent-twenties/) that he (they, I guess) predicted the ongoing turbulence of 2020. I believe Turchin has made this claim before, but it's a somewhat annoying claim for a pretty obvious reason: Turchin didn't, as far as I know, predict the pandemic that either caused or significantly contributed to most of the unrest of 2020. So he didn't really predict what's happening. Maybe it all would have happened anyway, but we don't know. He seems a lot like someone gloating about predicting a horse would a lose a race.. after the horse gets shot by a sniper in the bleachers. We all know that's not why he predicted the horse would lose.  I have some doubts about Turchin's general theory that there are consistent social/political cycles in history that civilizations follow, and his 2020 victory lap ironically underscores my some of my issues with his th
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