Bad Old Ideas and Intellectual Opportunity Costs

Never, ever fall into the trap of believing that any supposedly new and better concept of socialism/"market socialism"/"democratic socialism"/"participatory economics", etc. has even a shred of scholarly respectability. All of the concepts that aim at achieving economic rationality and/or moral excellence on the basis of some form of political control over factors of production have been thoroughly and conclusively discredited by the razor-sharp economic logic of Bohm-Bawerk, Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard. In addition, since this logic had been nonchalantly ignored, we subsequently and unfortunately accumulated practically endless empirical illustrations of its truth.

In other words, there is nothing dogmatic, ideological, and close-minded about automatically dismissing or ridiculing all kinds of supposedly new and better socialist proposals, just as there is nothing dogmatic, ideological, and close-minded about automatically dismissing or ridiculing all kinds of supposedly new and better justifications for slavery, dictatorship, or eugenic racism. This is not a matter of ideological prejudice, but of basic management of intellectual opportunity costs. There are simply too many interesting and genuinely promising issues to think about to justify wasting time on exploring any further the intellectual and moral dead-end of institutionalized economic chaos known as socialism.