Here is how I voted for the favorite free-market economist, journalist, business leader and think tank leader on the Free-Market Hall of Fame:
Favorite academic economist (past): Milton Friedman
Favorite academic economist (present): Gregory Mankiw
Favorite writer and journalist (past): Ayn Rand
Favorite writer and journalist (present): John Stossel
Favorite business leader and entrepreneur (past): Andrew Carneige
Favorite business leader and entrepreneur (present): Charles Koch
Favorite freedom organization and think-thank (past): Leonard Read
Favorite freedom organization and think-thank (present): Edward Crane III.
Favorite government official (past): Thomas Jefferson
Favorite government official (present): Vaclav Klaus
Hall of Shame (past): Karl Marx
Hall of Shame (present): Hugo Chavez
4 comments:
How's that!?! You just cannot put Karl Marx, one of the greatest philosophers ever, into the hall of shame! He laid the foundations of economic science in Das Kapital, wrote far-reaching critiques of 19th century political systems and was an accomplished and sharp-tongued defender of the freedom of the press. Are you acquainted with his work at all or are you just too lazy and rather dependent on neocon think-tank summaries of his work? Karl Marx was no fuckin' Stalin or Pinochet, you know ...
Oh don't worry I've read Karl Marx and it is not difficult to come to conclusion that Marxist theories do not work in practice. His theory of labor and value is a typical falsification and the abuse of economic science under fragile intelectual basis. His theories were put into practice in Soviet Union whose collapse clearly demonstrated the impossibility of calculation under socialist planning. If Marx's theories were correct, then Soviet Union would have flourished but at the end it demolished itself.
The foundation of economic science is always subject to methodological basis and the objective basis on which economy and society rest is a private property which Karl Marx urged to be abolished.
Regarding his contribution to economic science, his theories of labor and value had no sufficient basis on which the value could be justified. He didn't understood that labor is an input, not a measure of value as Marx stated.
And then there's also an experience . Policymakers which embraced Marxist theories (rather political propaganda than pure economic theory), at the end saw a collapse of the entire economy and society with painful legacy of communist labor relations and decades of stagnation and even longer economic recovery.
Regards,
Rocks
Do Platon's theories work in practice? Is he any less important for that?
As far as I know, Plato never urged for the abolition of private property. It'd be interesting to review the answers if you asked philosopher whom they consider more important in the time course of philosophy, Plato or Marx.
From Plato's workings it is readable that he understood that human rights could hardly be respected in the absence of private property.
And Plato contributed a lot to the mindful development of thinking. Karl Marx, despite being a powerful historian, hadn't contributed anything to the foundations of modern economic science because he thought that everything can be determined through labor responses to change, meaning that labor knows better how to manage the company than the original owner whom this private property (company) belongs. In addition, Marx assumed that the enactment of progressive taxation will eliminate per capita wealth distributional and functional inequality. Not surprisingly, this particular inequality increased under progressive taxation.
At last, regarding the common sense, the idea that confiscation of private property and means of production is positive for the social progress is like saying that your the collective group of neighbours knows better how to manage your property and household than yourself.
It'd be foolish and highly disrespectful to other current academic and historical economists and economic thinkers (Bastiat, Smith, Ricardo...) to claim that Karl Marx enriched the spectrum of economic science with collectivist theories that demonstrated themselves as wrong and falsified. Contribution to economic science is not measured on how much you write, but on how valuable your theories are when you apply them to complex macroeconomic and microeconomic problems. Nevertheless, Marx failed on that point.
Regards,
Rocks
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