Again, I am impressed with Dr. North's piercing historical accounts of failed policies of communist nations. Here, he recounts how Mises' socialist calculations were judged wrong by a bigwig communist, but years later, when communism was coming to an end, another communist admitted that Mises was right, but never in his textbooks.
WORKERS' PARADISES
The Soviet Union lasted as a socialist worker's paradise from 1917 until 1991. As a direct result of that experiment, at least 30 million Russians died. It may have been twice that. China's experiment was shorter: 1949 to 1978. Perhaps 60 million Chinese died.
The system failed to deliver the promised goods. I can think of no topic more suitable for a class in economics that a discussion of the failure of socialism. The same is true of a course in modern world history. A course in political science should cover this failure in detail.
They don't, of course. They do not begin with the fundamental challenge to socialist economic theory, Ludwig von Mises' 1920 essay, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. (http://mises.org/pdf/econcalc.pdf) Why not? Because most social scientists, economists, and historians have never heard of it Among people over age 50, the few who did hear of it heard about it from some pro-socialist or Keynesian advocate, who wrote what he had been told in graduate school in the 1960s, namely, that the article was totally refuted by Oskar Lange in 1936.
They are never told that when Lange, a Communist, returned to Poland in 1947 to serve in several high-level posts, the Communist government did not invite him to implement his grand theory of "market socialism." No other socialist nation ever did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_R._Lange
For 50 years, the textbooks, if they mentioned Mises at all, said only that Mises had been totally refuted by Lange. The Establishment academics dropped Mises down Orwell's memory hole.
On September 10, 1990, multimillionaire socialist author-economist Robert Heilbroner published an article in the "New Yorker." It was titled "After Communism." The USSR was visibly collapsing. In it, he recounted the story of the refutation of Mises. In graduate school, he and his peers were taught that Lange had refuted Mises. Then he announced: "Mises was right." Yet in his best-selling textbook on the history of economic thought, "The Worldly Philosophers," he never referred to Mises.
I don't think that I know anyone else who is better read on history than Dr. North. Not only does he know history, but he knows cultural history as well, pointing out how Western thinkers critical of Lenin, Stalin, and the Soviet Union's policy for mass murder were duped as reported in the following book by Paul Hollander. "There is a book about these naive, trusting souls, who were taken in completely, Paul Hollander's "Political pilgrims: travels of Western intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928-1978." It was published by Oxford University Press in 1981. It was ignored by the intelligentsia for a decade."
WORKERS' PARADISES
The Soviet Union lasted as a socialist worker's paradise from 1917 until 1991. As a direct result of that experiment, at least 30 million Russians died. It may have been twice that. China's experiment was shorter: 1949 to 1978. Perhaps 60 million Chinese died.
The system failed to deliver the promised goods. I can think of no topic more suitable for a class in economics that a discussion of the failure of socialism. The same is true of a course in modern world history. A course in political science should cover this failure in detail.
They don't, of course. They do not begin with the fundamental challenge to socialist economic theory, Ludwig von Mises' 1920 essay, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. (http://mises.org/pdf/econcalc.pdf) Why not? Because most social scientists, economists, and historians have never heard of it Among people over age 50, the few who did hear of it heard about it from some pro-socialist or Keynesian advocate, who wrote what he had been told in graduate school in the 1960s, namely, that the article was totally refuted by Oskar Lange in 1936.
They are never told that when Lange, a Communist, returned to Poland in 1947 to serve in several high-level posts, the Communist government did not invite him to implement his grand theory of "market socialism." No other socialist nation ever did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_R._Lange
For 50 years, the textbooks, if they mentioned Mises at all, said only that Mises had been totally refuted by Lange. The Establishment academics dropped Mises down Orwell's memory hole.
On September 10, 1990, multimillionaire socialist author-economist Robert Heilbroner published an article in the "New Yorker." It was titled "After Communism." The USSR was visibly collapsing. In it, he recounted the story of the refutation of Mises. In graduate school, he and his peers were taught that Lange had refuted Mises. Then he announced: "Mises was right." Yet in his best-selling textbook on the history of economic thought, "The Worldly Philosophers," he never referred to Mises.
I don't think that I know anyone else who is better read on history than Dr. North. Not only does he know history, but he knows cultural history as well, pointing out how Western thinkers critical of Lenin, Stalin, and the Soviet Union's policy for mass murder were duped as reported in the following book by Paul Hollander. "There is a book about these naive, trusting souls, who were taken in completely, Paul Hollander's "Political pilgrims: travels of Western intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928-1978." It was published by Oxford University Press in 1981. It was ignored by the intelligentsia for a decade."
