This is a nifty little volume. I like the type size, I like the cover. It's printed in a series entitled Advances in Heterodox Economics, by U. of Michigan Press.
There are only 145 pages, and I'm on p. 20.
Basically what Burczak does is he finds resources in Hayek to talk about the general good, and runs with them.
On p. 3 he says that we must ban wages, and institute a total redistribution of wealth.
Already I'm thinking this is going to be a white-knuckle ride into the wooliest socialist thicket I've ever been in, but it keeps getting weirder and wilder.
On p. 12 he dismisses fear itself. Don't be afraid. Meanwhile, I'm seeing huge peaks and valleys of a roller-coaster economy in which wages are banned, teenagers are given enormous sums of money (he suggests 100 grand for every late teen, so that they can start a company), and he says that all companies should be cooperatives owned by their workers.
I'm thinking: what's wrong with this picture?
I've met Burczak and he's one of these high-IQ guys who can without effort outthink me on almost any topic. Yet he's polite enough not to rub it in. He probably has 40 IQ points on me. My IQ (I hate math) is something about 140 or 145. I can feed myself, let's say. But Burczak is probably on the order of 180. Way up there. But he grew up in a little town without any commercial joints. Did he ever work?
I thought about my life as described in my novel Temping. In it, a shiftless guy works shifts at jobs he doesn't care about for decades. He likes it that way. Give him a stake in a company and he wouldn't care. Sell it for a cheeseburger, or give it to someone on the street, he'd just as soon watch a ladybug sleep.
Ted Burczak assumes that other people are as smart as he is, and that they care about the world as he does.
They don't. Lots of people are loaded down with tattoos and care only about the moment.
Give them a stake in a company and the company is doomed. It's only when I'm about forty that I started to think about the future.
Someone in a company has to assume the risk, and take -- how can I put this -- ? charge. That is, someone has to have the idea, as Henry Ford had an idea, and then build the apparatus with oversight mechanism to see the cars through the assembly lines and into the show rooms and into people's driveways where they're satisfied with product, and talk it up so others buy it, so the cars can keep rolling.
Almost no one has this kind of genius. Ted Burczak assumes that everyone does.
I'd say it's one in a million. Why socialism doesn't work is that it clogs board rooms with bored party members whose relationship to genius is that of an aphid to an apple tree. They can't produce anything but yesses and wild guesses.
Still, I'm getting a wild overview of market thinking from a cutting edge thinker. He's a real postmodernist, and totally wild. Just thinking about his book I want to hold on to a ring, and scream like heck, as if it's Coney Island, and the visions of the future coming are enough to make a grown man hysterical.
Now I'm going to read another twenty pages. If I end up in the asylum, you'll know why.
8 comments:
I'm a little bit puzzled how someone as smart as you say can draw on Hayek to defend socialism, unless he obtained a copy of The Road To Serfdom written in an alternate universe.
You spend a lot of time being self effacing, and I think that may not be warranted. I would like to hear more about wha you discover in reading this book.
What Burczak seems to do in general is to focus on snippets of counter-argument within Hayek's own work, and then uses it to fast-forward a notion of what that must mean. He does something similar with Adam Smith where Smith admits that even if having 17 people mass-produce nails in an assembly line gets the nails done faster, it's not necessarily better for each maker of nails, that is, it might make an incurably cramped world for the one who spends fifty years sharpening the heads of nails.
Conclusion Burczak would draw isn't exactly Fourierist in its implication that each person should mobilize their production potential solely on account of desire, but I think he's moving in that direction.
Suffice it to say that I too had written off all socialists as mentally imbalanced, if not mentally handicapped. But when you talk with Burczak you find your mind getting sharper and sharper.
He's like a pencil sharpener. After talking to him for an hour I was working on Sudoku puzzle #346 in Will short's book, and found I did the whole thing in about six minutes, and got it all right.
I attributed this to Burczak's salutary influence.
That said, I'm still not buying socialism, but AM reading his book, and going on to p. 31.
I keep having to stop and read up on things: just did a tutorial on marginal utility theory, and could understand the use of utility, but not the use of marginal.
Utility just means the value of something is connected to its use. So, if you need water to continue to function, and you are in a desert, then water is more valuable than a diamond, to use the Adam Smith problem.
But if you want to cut precise glass shapes, water won't help you much, but diamonds will, and since there aren't that many (this has something to do with the use of the term margin), then diamonds suddenly become more important.
Expect me to say something else again about Burczak's book in about two days, at which point I'm hoping to be on p. 100.
Problem is I keep looking up all the authors he names as I go: liberal postmodernists named GM Madison, and a person named Gossens, who invented marginal utility theory, and Dave Prychitko, an actual communist, and so many others, as I crawl forward through the text.
Progressivism--which is the idea that one knows better than the powers that be--has been around, if Genesis is to be believed, since the creation of the world; and if the Isaian/Revelation interpretation of spirits is correct, maybe even longer than that (c.f. Dr. Johnson's "the first Whig was the Devil").
It got an interesting infusion of power when some folks decided that Jesus' message that we can all be Children of God mixed with Peter and Paul's assertion that we must obey the laws of God before the laws of men meant that somehow Heaven could be brought to Earth and that nations (instead of people) could be saved.
From this bad interpretation of scripture we get people rebelling against Pope and Kings--and the problem with liking any of this is where do you stop?
It if was okay for Luther to incite wars and divorce and general chaos, why is it not okay for the Black Panthers or the CPUSA or Bush&Obama to do the same thing?
We'll continue in this vein while we think that the Kingdom of God is something that can be obtained either in earth or in Heaven.
Oh, sorry, forgot the rest of my post.
Anyway, Progressives--because they all think because we are equal before God we are equal--sacrifice themselves on the altar of absolute egalitarianism (everyone is the same).
A smart cookie like Burczak can't imagine-or doesn't want to believe--that he's smarter than 99% of the world. Try convincing him that 85% of the world can't do college-level work and he'll balk at you and say something about economics or health care or dietary habits.
All smart Progressives should be required to do three to five years of inner-city teaching or social work before they can voice their opinions.
GM, for Christians like us there is the possibility of an afterlife.
For lapsed Presbyterians like Ted Burczak, or for lapsed Lutherans like Marx, the idea of an afterlife is an opiate that forestalls the pain of this world.
Their idea is to take the descriptions of the green fields of the New Jerusalem and to try to make them ripen in the here and now.
Luther thought this would only lead to a poisonous interbreeding of the two kingdoms.
But Luther did improve things.
Compare northern Europe with southern Europe.
I grant the food is not as good, and the art is not as good, but the philosophy is sharper, the industry actually functions, the machinery works better.
Luther set free the notion of scientific inquiry so that it no longer had to accord with churchly thought. He did the same thing with art.
He freed up freedom of inquiry.
There are no mafias in northern European countries.
That's a southern European thing.
So you can improve the world. A hundred years ago the plumbing was made of wood and in some areas for instance in Baltimore you pooped into the same tubes from which you got water.
Discovery of bacteria and germs have improved our hygiene and increased our longevity.
We have to listen to the socialists.
Now and then, they may come up with something.
So far, it's just been killing fields and gulags and mass trials, and ways to keep their family in power (why Kim Jong-Il is killing all his top brass to pave the way for his son's rise to power as he departs from this sunny and cheerful world).
But you never know. Miracles happen.
What Burczak is attempting to do is to make a free-market economy and social justice intertwine.
He is at bottom a Christian, who was raised in a small church in the Catskills. He's a lapsed Presbyterian, I think I recall.
He's friends with lots of Christians.
He doesn't hate us.
Well, I don't know. Ted somehow knows the difference between North Korean and South Korean cuisine, but for some reason he continues to think with a little sauce, and perhaps a tad better reflection in the fortune cookie, North Korean cuisine will open up.
I want to finish his book before I can say definitively that he's just plain wrong.
He might also get one or two things correct. Meanwhile, he's state of the art socialism, so I think it's important to at least try it out.
As long as it doesn't mean having to dine with the yingyangs in Pyongyang. I mean, really, what does it cost me?
G.M., your faith in the 'powers that be' (here, not God, but king and pope) seems to be just as absolute and dogmatic as the communist's faith in the proletariat (and therefore just as flawed).
Democracy (which I know you hate) is the best system we've found because the power is not in the hands of the masses, but the masses can choose who has the power. It's a nice balance, better than idiotrulers getting to procreate and pass on their falsely-God-given power, or the mob having complete mob rule.
Progressives have been right about more than they've been wrong about - at least in countries with protestant backgrounds - you just take the progressives' innovations for granted, and since what was once progress is now tradition, you think you can claim them as your own.
Since you don't believe that the 'people' can ever know what's best for them when compared to the 'powers that be,' where do you start things from? Which 'powers that be' do you believe should be in charge, and why?
Progressives may sometimes try too hard to bring heaven to earth. A lot of times, they just want to make things better...
Your approach seems to be to just simply wish that the fall had never happened, and to equate any questioning of authority with Satan's questioning of God's authority...yet none of the questioned authorities on earth are actually God.
Again, your lack of two-kindgoms thinking seems to make you susceptible to making analogous the power of ephemeral rulers with the power of the eternal ruler.
Silly GM. You need a bailout!
Brett, just wanted to say hi to you. I think you are the only other person to see the utility of the two kingdoms concept. Maybe you can sneak it into a movie script at some point. Two characters smoking a joint on a rafting trip and after they go through white water, talk on the beach about two kingdoms.
Oh, I don't know how you would work it in.
Two characters parachuting out of a jet, and one of them decides to initiate the other into the intricacies of the two kingdoms philosophy as they swirl down.
I mean, that's the kind of thing I might do.
Under fire, with tank fire incoming, start talking with the others in the foxhole about two kingdoms.
While dumping lead over the side at the onrushing N. Koreans, say.
What are we fighting for?
Ask me, I give a damn.
We're fighting for the two kingdoms concept, as it was put into the bill of rights by James Madison.
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