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A couple of years ago (July 2018) I gave a talk at a Students for Liberty conference on \u201cZombie Economics\u201d with particular reference to the Marxist \u201cmanifestation\u201d of this intellectual beast which refuses to die, no matter how many times it has been \u201ckilled\u201d (intellectually speaking of course). It has been the revolutionary Marxists who have done most of the killing once they have seized political power and find that their utopian economic schemes fail to work as planned). As of 1997, the total of deaths caused by the attempt to impose Marxist economic polices since the experiment began in 1917 in Russia is about 94 million and rising. It would be much more if one included other variants of socialism such as \u201cnational\u201d socialism. [See, St\u00e9phane Courtois, Andrzej Paczkowski, Nicolas Werth, et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression<\/em> (Harvard University Press, 1997)].<\/p>\n [See \u201c How to kill the Marxist zombie once and for all: or, how you can learn to stop worrying about S&M on campus<\/a> ,\u201d YAL Conference, Washington D.C. 26 July, 2018.]<\/p>\n Of course, Marxism is not the only variant of \u201czombie economics\u201d which advocates of the free market have had to deal with. And economists from other schools of thought naturally have the opposite view. They, like the Keynesian economist from the University of Queensland, John Quiggen, think that free market ideas should also be described as \u201czombie economics\u201d, or as he put it in the subtitle of his book of the same title, \u201chow dead ideas still walk among us.\u201d The specific examples of these ideas he gave prominence on the front cover were \u201cprivatized social security,\u201d \u201ctrickle-down economics,\u201d and \u201cefficient financial markets.\u201d ((John Quiggin, Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us. With a new chapter by the author<\/em> (Princeton U.P., 2012).)).<\/p>\n The most prevalent form of zombie economics until recently is \u201cprotectionism\u201d, which is really a euphemism for special privileges granted to some domestic\/national producers and their workers in order to shield or \u201cprotect\u201d them from competitive forces and thus guarantee the continuation of their profits and wages, and to prevent by force other domestic consumers and producers and their workers from buying cheaper (usually foreign) alternatives. Or in other words, every act of \u201cprotection\u201d for some must inevitably cause \u201charm\u201d to others – which is a classic example of Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Bastiat\u2019s notion of \u201cthe seen\u201d (protection of some) and \u201cthe unseen\u201d (harm to others). [See my blogpost on Bastiat on the Seen and the Unseen<\/a> (29 May, 2020) and my paper Bastiat on the Seen and the Unseen: An Intellectual History<\/a>.]<\/p>\n However a second manifestation of zombie economics has appeared in recent years, that of a resurgence of interest in fully fledged \u201csocialism\u201d, even Marxism. This coincided with the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia which was very positively commented upon in papers like the New York Times<\/em>; the acclaim for the French economist Thomas Picketty\u2019s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century<\/em> (Harvard, 2017) (which was intended to be an update to Marx\u2019s volume of same name which appeared in 1867); and the appearance of the film \u201cThe Young Marx\u201d (2017), funded by numerous state film and TV organizations in the European Union, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Marx\u2019s birth in 1818; to cite only a few examples.<\/p>\n Given this revived interest in things Socialist or Marxist I want to revisit some of the key socialist and Marxist thinkers of the past, to see what they actually thought could and should replace the \u201cchaos of the market\u201d and the \u201cimmiseration of the working class\u201d by \u201cpredatory capitalism,\u201d and the response of classical liberals and political economists of the time to these ideas. I have prepared a summary of socialist criticisms of private property, and the free market; and a similar list of CL answers to these criticisms and their critique of socialism. I will detail these in future posts.<\/p>\n If one were feeling charitable towards the \u201cideal\u201d of socialism (which I am not) one might take the view of J.S. Mill who argued that the ideal<\/em> of classical liberalism can be compared with the ideal<\/em> of socialism (which was possible at his time – the 1850s and 1860s); but the reality<\/em> of the free market could not be compared to the reality<\/em> of socialism, as the latter had not yet been put into practice. The 20th century would provide that \u201creality check\u201d which was not available in Mill\u2019s own lifetime. We now I think have all the evidence we need to make that comparison. By 1920, as Ludwig von Mises conclusively demonstrated in his essay on \u201cEconomic Calculation under Socialism\u201d, the jury was in.<\/p>\n In short, I have noticed is two things about the early history of socialist thought: the general weakness (even naivety and absurdity) of the ideas put forward on behalf of socialism beginning largely in the 1820s and reaching a pinnacle in the 1840s on the eve of the 1848 Revolution, and the enduring strength of the CL critique which also began at this time. When Marx attempted to make socialism more \u201cscientific\u201d with his three volume book on Das Kapital<\/em> (1869-96) things in my view did not improve, as B\u00f6hm-Bawerk demonstrated in his demolition of Marxist economic theory when Marx\u2019s third and final volume appeared posthumously in print. It makes one wonder why these zombie economic ideas continue to be advocated today and why the liberal critique continues to be ignored.<\/p>\n Historically, I think we can identify the following different kinds of socialism which have been advocated at different times:<\/p>\n Classical liberals and political economists responded to the challenge of socialism in the following periods when socialist ideas were seen as a growing threat:<\/p>\n I have begun to assemble a collection of works by socialist writers and their critics on my website to document the strengths\/weaknesses of the socialist position and their enduring appeal; as well as the often devastating critique offered by classical liberals and the political economists. I will begin with \u201cthe French Connection\u201d in another post, before moving on to late 19th century English, German, and French socialist thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Zombie Economics A couple of years ago (July 2018) I gave a talk at a Students for Liberty conference on \u201cZombie Economics\u201d with particular reference to the Marxist \u201cmanifestation\u201d of this intellectual beast which refuses to die, no matter how many times it has been \u201ckilled\u201d (intellectually speaking of course). It has been the revolutionary … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_import_markdown_pro_load_document_selector":0,"_import_markdown_pro_submit_text_textarea":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[77,79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tradition","category-economics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=950"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":203936,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions\/203936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/zombiemarxism300.jpg\")
<\/p>\nSocialist Economic Thought before it became Zombified<\/h2>\n
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The Classical Liberal Response to the Rise of Socialism<\/h2>\n
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