Shorter Megan McArdle: The free hand of the marketplace has eliminated scarcity and communism arose because idealistic Russians wanted to make production more efficient.
Please tell me I misinterpreted that post. Otherwise McArdle spent $100,00 and McArdle's parents spent about $125,000 on her education for nothing. Talk about a misallocation of resources.
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McArdle has just thrown a few names onto ECON100 claptrap. I read her piece and thought : This is all perfect markets, she hasn't mentioned anything about power.
So THEN I read the linked article & sure enough, it was entirely about the extent to which power has replaced supply & demand as a price determinant, and speculation about how to deal with it.
The open question is whether McArdle is deliberately ignoring what she linked to is about, or whether she didn't read it.
I think it was deliberate because she said:
"Actually, Harris is channeling Paul Mason, the author of the book he is reviewing, and unfortunately, he doesn't really try to answer the question. Instead he makes the stridently timid argument that this won't happen because the capitalists won't let it, at least without a healthy dose of revolutionary action."
She could not let this insult against capitalism stand! It's strident to mention power or coercion!
Somebody actually told her that line about pretending to pay and pretending to work?
I think somebody probably told her grandfather that line. Jeez, what a maroon. She sounds like a freshman undergrad. I could crank out specious cliches and overgeneralizations, myself. Anyone hiring?
Tony--it's a literary tic. It's possible she thinks everybody else in the world has not heard the line before, but lying about her sources is a reflex.
"Stridently timid"??? This piece may deserve a full-scale fisking, some of the worst writing I've seen from her.
I don't believe anyone told her that line either. It's such a clichéd Randian B-movie line. (Evidently she's rereading Atlas Shrugged.) Next she will tell us that an Italian colleague told her at least Obama makes the trains run on time.
There is so much junk in that post. She tells us that money won't affect parenting after telling us about a study that show paying parents money helped improve their parenting skills.
That people didn't join up at WWII because of the paychecks, after a decade of Depression and desperation for paychecks.
The whole pretense that we have a free market and that free market allocates resources efficiently.
That capitalism isn't a bunch of guys sitting around in offices making decisions.
That productivity hasn't separated from wages.
That some goods and services are not optional purchases or monopolies don't exit and so on and so on.
She chides Communism for being naive and simplistic, but praises the purity of capitalism and the efficiency of supply and demand, as if there were no manipulated markets.
We all know that wealth makes people more moral, as McArdle says, so markets can't possibly be manipulated for gain.
I associate the paying / working joke with Czechs, but evidently it can be traced to the Soviet Union.
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