Sorry for a late post or whatever, I am sick.
Hayek/Von Misses take on look at the early SU and come to a conclusion: that central planning was impossible and inefficient. The reasons for this, they said are, that, on the one hand there is an information problem. It is impossible to know all the necessary information and make all the necessary calculations in an economy involving millions of consumers, producers and commodities.
Second argument was that prices are determined by markets and that these are the one who determine investment and production decissions. Without the market sending signals to producers and consumers they would never be able to fix the right prices for things and therefore the wrong investment decissions would be made.
One main factor I must state again is that these economists were criticising the shortcomings of "war communism". That was really a war economy in which there was no democratic planning at all. The civil war conditions compelled the Soviet leadership to make very harsh decissions and to use force to get them implemented. Thus for instance many agricultural producers were simply expropiated of their crops in order to feed the army of the workers in the city, without them getting very much in exchange. The main aim was to win the war and all necessary means for that were taken. That was not therefore a model of democratic planning of the economy in normal conditions at all. Also the Misses/Hayek school (and you OAO) identify central planning with command economy, command economy is a bourgeois concept which is basically designed to imply that there cannot be democracy and planning at the same time.
The main flaw of these arguments is that prices of commodities are not determined by the market (that is demand and offer), but rather by the amount of socially necessary labour time needed to produce them (this is Marx's labour theory of value). Therefore, even without the existence of the market there is an objective way of fixing the prices of products, that is by measuring the amount of necessary labour time to produce them. I am repeating myself here, I know, but if One and Only does not agree with this with this (in common with most bourgeois economists) then we have a problem because we are starting from so different points of view that the whole discussion becames irrelevant.
Now, even Adam Smith recognised that the prices of commodities could vary, go up and down, but tended to gravitate towards what he called "natural prices" which were determined by the costs of production. Do you think that offer and demand determine the price of commodities? Offer and demand can modify the prices of things, up and down, create low and high prices, but notice that "low" and "high" prices imply that there is a "normal" price. And how is this determined? By the amount of labour that goes into producing this commodity. This is so obvious.
In fact your example doesn't make sense, I don't know how long it takes to make a computer, but if it took the same amount of labour as making a hammer takes then I think we would either have lots of easily made computers, or not many hammers, either scenario would change both products value
Maybe you should read
Wage Labour and Capital and
Value, Price and Profit
Oh, and if you say things like "Planned economys are inneficient", well, I may have to point out that even with beuracratic missmanagment and bungling, the SU still managed to be a world superpower in a fraction of the time it took the USA or any other big capitalists in Europe. If you want to argue the efficiency of the SU compared to a system that keeps half the population in poverty but at the same time has hundreds of millions of unemployed, then start another thread.
Abcdxxx does not want me to call myself Socialist, so, what is the model of socialist economy that I are proposing? It is one in which there is no private property of the means of production and also in which all decissions related to the economy are taken democratically by the workers themselves. How are these decissions taken? There is a central plan of the economy which determines the main priorities (new fields of investment, industries to be developed, etc These decissions would be taken democratically with the participation of the workers through their representative bodies. Other decissions would be taken at different levels of the economy (national, regional, local, neighbourhood, etc) also in a democratic way.
In fact, today, with the advances of information technology, socialist planning would be made much easier.
Quote:
The argument has been that some inefficiency can be tolerated so as to improve the status of the workers, although I maintain otherwise.
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Gee, you are such a nice person One and Only
Another thing: I understood what Kahljorn said
Max Burbank, you may be speaking in a different context to what I am thinking, but could you please explain why it is an example of a collective, I don't see it.