Teoría política

"pensarás que el mercado resuelve todos los problemas sin la intervención de las autoridades"

No, confesaré que no los resuelve todos, a condición de que tú reconozcas, por tu parte, que las peores soluciones a los problemas que afligen a este desdichado mundo, las más torpes, costosas, entrometidas y arbitrarias son las ideadas por el Santo Estado.

Y, por cierto, Antonio, me alegra ver que reapareces, a ver si lo haces más a menudo, es muy agradable que personas inteligentes le lleven a uno la contraria.

Estoy siguiendo con mucho interés el debate entre Mamífero y Mill sobre la energía, a ver en qué para aquello.

Tal vez pero el problema ecológico existe, y bien haríamos en tomar medidas. Sin duda que el curriculum de los paises socialistas reales a este respecto no es envidiable. El Mar de Aral, Chernobyl, para que vamos a seguir.
Estuve leyendo el otro día una trabajo de los economistas socialistas Paul Cokshott y Alain Cotrell que intentan contestar a Mises y su tesis de la imposibilidad del cálculo económico bajo el socialismo. Mises decía que usando el tiempo de trabajo como standard para el cálculo económico diez horas de trabajo usando x recursos y diez horas usando x+1 son lo mismo. (Lo cual parece irrefutable a primera vista, y ellos no pueden por menos de reconocer que Houston, tenemos un problema) Pero a pesar de mis rudimentarios conocimientos de economía me parece interesante la respuesta que ofrecen: bajo el capitalismo la situación muchas veces no es mejor:
We do not wish to deny there is a problem here. We do, however, find it rather
remarkable that Mises (and his expositor, Lavoie) should talk as if the problem solves
itself under capitalism. Neither offers any criticism of the classic Ricardian theory, according
to which the market price system also fails to take into account non-reproducible
resources. For Ricardo, natural resource constraints manifest themselves in the price
system via rising marginal cost of production, i.e. just the effect which Mises takes to
be inadequate. For the intra-marginal output, price is indeed above labour value, but at
the margin rent is zero and the exploitation of natural resources comes free. (There is
a difference here: if labour value is defined as average socially necessary labour time,
then the labour-value calculation will ‘undervalue’ certain products relative to Ricardian
prices, but this could be overcome by evaluating the relevant products at their
marginal labour content.)
In fact, matters are not infrequently worse under capitalism. The fact that a certain
resource is ultimately exhaustible does not necessarily mean that it is subject to diminishing
returns in the short run. In the westward expansion of American agriculture, for
instance, the (geographically) marginal land was actually the most productive. In such
cases the market provides no incentive whatever for resource conservation; the results
were painfully evident in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. We are not claiming that labourtime
calculation would necessarily do better in cases where the market fails to conserve
resources. We do contend, however, that socialist planners should be able to take more
far-sighted decisions on resource conservation than profit-maximizing firms.8 We cannot
argue this point at length here; two observations will have to suffice.9
First, the planning authority could make it a principle that whenever it employs
technologies that consume non-reproducible resources, it invests in research into the
production of substitutes. The amount of such investment that should be undertaken
cannot be decided by any simple algorithm (in market or planned systems), but once
a decision is reached, the cost of the research could be ‘charged’ to the resourceconsuming
industries (i.e. the planners would pro-rate the labour time required in this
endeavour across the products of these industries). Here is a non-arbitrary way of
bringing resource considerations into the domain of labour-time accounting. But second,
we should emphasize that we do not regard labour-time calculation as providing
a mechanical decision procedure for all planning questions. A socialist society
might open up democratic debate on specific technologies or projects with substantial environmental impacts, and might allow environmental considerations to override
‘efficiency’ measured in terms of labour-minimization. We have no problem with the
idea that environmental considerations and labour-time accounting are not necessarily
reducible to a scalar common denominator, and that the balancing of these considerations
may require political judgment on which opinions can differ. Mises, to his credit,
is also quite willing to admit that important environmental issues cannot be brought
within the ambit of monetary calculation either—witness his discussion of the decision
whether to build a waterworks which might destroy the natural beauty of a waterfall,
which is designed to illustrate the general point that money “can never obtain as a measure
of those value-determining elements which stand outside the domain of exchange
transactions” (1935: 98–99). Whether the conservation of Mises’ waterfall can better
be trusted to a private landowner, voluntarily eschewing the maximization of profit, or
to a National Parks Board, is a matter of judgment: we incline to the latter.