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Review of Theodore Burczak’s “Socialism after Hayek”

Submitted by Shaka on Sat, 08/01/2009 - 17:16
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Theodore Burczak’s Socialism after Hayek is the 2007 winner of the Smith Center Annual Prize in Austrian Economics.

Socialism after Hayek has been trumpeted as a “stimulating book” in the pages of the Review of Austrian Economics.

“Very deep” gushes Steve Horwitz, the organizer of a conference at the Institute for Humane Studies to promote this latest advance in Austrian Economics.

Peter J. Boettke writes:

Theodore A. Burczak's Socialism after Hayek is a thoroughly researched and thoughtful examination not only of the ideological debate that framed the twentieth century, but of Hayek's intellectual framework. Burczak hopes for an economic framework that is both humanistic in its approach and humanitarian in its concern while being grounded in good reasons. The book should be on the reading list of every comparative political economist and in particular anyone who wants to take Hayek seriously, including those who would like to push Hayek's classical liberal politics toward the left in the twenty-first century. Burczak has made an outstanding contribution to the fields of political and economic thought and to Hayek studies in particular.

Stephen Resnick writes:

A brilliant, fair-minded approach to Marx, Hayek, Sen, and Nussbaum yields a needed socialist vision for the twenty-first century.

I have written a short review of Burczak’s Socialism after Hayek.

Have I given this “needed socialist vision for the twenty-first century” a fair and accurate critique? Let me hear your opinion!

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Is this really what Austrians believe?

Submitted by Shaka on Sat, 08/08/2009 - 15:53.

Theodore Burczak writes:

To address the inequality of opportunity produced by disparate wealth holding, Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott (1999) propose the establishment of what they call a “stakeholder society.” A stakeholder society is one in which all citizens have a claim to a social inheritance. Ackerman and Alstott suggest that this social inheritance should take the form of a large cash grant to all citizens when they reach the age of majority, a grant large enough to promote substantive equality of opportunity… which they calculate to be roughly eighty thousand dollars.

Ackerman and Alstott’s stakeholding proposal, if modified slightly, offers an attractive institutional structure to achieve socialist distributive justice while also promoting worker self-management and socialist appropriative justice. While Ackerman and Alstott use possession of the means to attend college as the standard proxy for equality of opportunity, labor-managed market socialism might use possession of the means to purchase the average capital stock per worker as the standard measure of equal opportunity. This would raise the amount of the stake to around one hundred thousand dollars.

Another modification to Ackerman and Alstott’s proposal follows from the capability approach to justice. Ackerman and Alstott would place no limit on how people could use their social inheritance… But using the stake to buy a car or to travel around the world – options permitted by Ackerman and Alstott’s liberal stakeholding proposal – would be prohibited by a socialist stakeholder society.

Is this really what Austrians believe? That every 18-year-old should be given $100,000 of taxpayer money?

If it's not, they why was Burczak awarded the Smith Center Annual Prize in Austrian Economics? Why is the Institute for Humane Studies holding a conference in Burczak's honor?

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Shaka, you so crazy! www.axiomaticeconomics.com