Economics of Pure Communism

1969 essay by radical economist Howard Sherman

URL = http://www.scribd.com/doc/2172593/The-Economics-of-Pure-Communism-1969-Howard-J-Sherman

Citation

"The economic arguments against communism were examined and found wanting. An economy of 70% or 80% free consumer goods seems possible--with little or no loss in perfotmance--in an easily foreseeable future. A gradual increase of the free goods sector, with careful attention to elasticities of demand, should make it possible to maintain equilibrium of supply and demand for all products, assuming present rates of productivity increase in the USA or USSR. Second, a gradual increase of free goods combined with continued wages to pay for the remaining priced (luxury) goods should present few new incentive problems. Third, with the use of accounting prices for free goods (derived from optimal programming processes), optimal planning can continue to function as well as under. socialism. Moreover, the planning can be centralized or decentralized as preferred, assuming the accounting prices are given to the managers as parameters. Finally, if economic performance is at least as good as in socialism, most of the arguments in favour of communism are non-economic--but these are beyond the scope of this article." (http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2008/02/communist-manifesto-of-chris-anderson.html)