[R-G] Costs and Benefits of Economic Alternatives

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

It's common for people to present the economic alternative they prefer
as if it could bring only benefits at no cost while seeing only costs
and few to no benefit in the other alternatives.  Liberals, populists,
and socialists, imho, have all been guilty of this.

A better way of looking at political economy is to see each economic
alternative as likely to entail (given evidence from past and present)
its own distinctive costs and benefits (different from the respective
costs and benefits of other alternatives) and how each tends to
distribute its costs and benefits to social classes and strata.
Liberal economy has its costs (e.g., large inequality in power --
between classes and between nations -- that never stops growing) and
benefits (e.g., incentives aka market discipline to spur productivity
growth and discover new wants), populist economy has its costs (e.g.,
inflation or stagnation or both) and benefits (e.g., the tendency to
appeal to all working people -- peasants, wage workers,
petit-bourgeoisie -- if not the ruling class), socialist economy has
its costs (e.g., the tendency to create shortages; and few incentives
to discover new wants) and benefits (e.g. the most egalitarian
distribution; and the chance for people to consciously and
collectively govern themselves, rather than have the market blindly
govern them in a way that atomizes them).

In other words, to struggle for socialism is to struggle to have
certain benefits at certain costs, not to struggle to have all
benefits one might want at no cost.  People have to understand the
trade-off, and for them to understand it, we have to have honest
discussion and detailed examination of political economy under all its
historical and present varieties.
--
Yoshie