RE: ECONOMICS: Re: Globalization and corporate power

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu Aug 23 2001 - 10:48:10 MDT


Brian Williams writes

> Communism and socialism do not fail because of a correctable
> technical problem, but because of an incorrectable humanistic one.

Yes, but that turns out not to be the *only* reason that they fail.
To emphasize (and sorry if you are already aware of this), but for
over thirty years I thought that the above was the *only* reason
that communism and socialism fail, namely that those systems simply
don't take the statistical nature of human beings into account.
(Systems based on human self-interest work vastly better.)

The *other*, equally important, completely independent reason is
that economies are too complex to be centrally administrated.
When quadrillions of decisions must be made, nearly optimal
decisions have to be made locally, in accordance with local
conditions.

Lee



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