Quote from: mentalove on December 07, 2012, 06:32:54 AM

wow thanks for this post, i downloaded the 3 part series and it was awesome. i am going to read the communist manifesto and learn more about marx. we always hear about hayek vs keynes but i know little about marx.

Yes, and read marx and think carefully as you read. You will often find that Marx's economic logic often falls in on itself. His biggest stupidity is something called the "Labor Theory of Value." Marx suggests that fundamentally its the work that goes into something that makes it valuable, and that all the work should be valued equally by society. But this type of thing just falls in on itself if you just think it through. Imagine hiring workers to dig a tremendous ditch in the middle of nowhere, a lot of work goes into it, but what really is the value? Imagine the same resources used to build a tremendous bridge over a wide river linking two great cities. (Where previously slow and expensive boats and passenger ferries were used.) The bridge has obvious value in decreasing the time, energy and resources used to cross people and things. Those savings can be called the 'benefits' of the bridge. Now we can calculate the value by weighing the benefits against the costs.

The fundamental flaw of socialism and the marx way of looking at economic issues is a failure to explain how decision making regarding what to build, how much to make and how best to build it is ever arrived at. In most historic implementations of Marxian ideology such as soviet communism and the various flavors of socialism, the lack of an accurate mechanism to weigh 'prices vs costs' or 'benefits vs resources expended' are at the root of their failure, and i think this is a well understood point amongst dare i say, real economists.

After you read marx, may I suggest Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, which is just 60 pages and is free: http://www.fee.org/library/detail/economics-in-one-lesson-pdf-doc-audio#axzz2EQ2VTal2

There is a pdf, or .doc file which is complete and an mp3 which is just a summary.