carnes@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP (Richard Carnes) (01/26/85)
D. K. Mc Kiernan writes: > Mr. Carnes declares that he will not debate economics with me. Not exactly. I'll be happy to debate economics, but I am not a specialist in the subject and such a debate could probably not be carried very far. In a non-specialist forum such as net.politics it is quite fair to point out that there are professional economists who do not agree with Mc Kiernan's views on this or that. Naturally, this would not constitute a refutation, any more than a sweeping statement that Bohm-Bawerk sank Marx's boat constitutes a proof. [We all know, on the authority of Thomas Aquinas, that the argument from authority is not valid: "The argument from authority is invalid. For Boethius says...." I don't know who Boethius' authority was.] > What's this tommy-rot about 'extract the worker's production for their own > profit'? Such notions were completely refuted by Eugen Ritter von Bohm > Bawerk in *Capital and Interest*. Statements like this make me wonder what stage Mc Kiernan has reached in his economics education. The freshman who has just finished Econ 101 thinks economists know everything. And they give you your Ph.D. when you figure out that economists don't know anything. (Economics is not unique in this regard.) It is not clear from the statement above just what it was that Bohm-Bawerk refuted, but it sounds like the concept of surplus value (essentially, unpaid labor). This will be big news to numerous radical and Marxist economists who have been familiar with Bohm-Bawerk's writings for decades. Again, I suggest that Mc Kiernan publish his results and achieve the fame he deserves. "Surplus value" is alive and well and living in many cities around the world. > And, in case anybody out there has ideas of quoting the Astro-Marxists > (probably nobody does): I'm ready. The Astro-Marxists, of course, were those centered around Betelgeuse in the 23rd century. I wouldn't dream of quoting Hilferding. > Marx's predictions notwithstanding, participants haven't neatly divided > into the proletariat and bourgeoisie. Marx made that prediction in the Manifesto. He changed his mind in later life. Now I have a question to pose to libertarians. Various libertarians have made the point that wealth doesn't just generate itself magically, it has to be created by the labor of people. With which I entirely agree (nature, of course, is the other source of wealth). At the same time, however, libertarians say that people are entitled, in some circumstances, to appropriate wealth even though they haven't performed any labor to produce any new wealth. For example, in my Libertaria story, Jack could collect profits from his ownership of a factory, he could collect rent as a landlord, and he could make money by lending it at interest (there's no inflation, remember). And he could do all of this while asleep, performing no more work than now and then phoning his accountant. So why does he have the right to appropriate this wealth, according to libertarians? Shouldn't the people who create the new wealth get to keep all of it? Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes