Archive for July 2009
Salerno on Socialism and Calculation
Here is Joe Salerno’s excellent summary of the Economic Calculation Debate.
The sniping remarks about the utopian socialists are pure gold. Salerno also mentions Charles Fourier, the man who argued that not only would socialism be more productive than capitalism but that under socialism:
- the North Pole would be milder than the Mediterranean
- the seas would lose their salt and become oceans of lemonade
- the world would contain 37 million poets equal to Homer, 37 million mathematicians equal to Newton and 37 million dramatists equal to Molière, although “these are approximate estimates”
The reality turns out to be very different.

