Has anyone read Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy?

[Odin]

(07-06-2016, 08:38 PM)Galen Wrote:

(07-05-2016, 04:40 PM)Odin Wrote: Hayek is one of the few Libertarian political philosophers I have any respect for. "Centralized Planning" was the hip "in" thing all along the political spectrum when he wrote The Road to Serfdom and it needed a good takedown, although I think his own ideological biases made him too quick to condemn all Leftist thought as if it were Stalinism.

Considering that is where leftist thought tends to go in the end it would seem that Hayek's position is quite reasonable.  So far every place that goes down that road ends up in poverty complete with a nasty police state.  Let us look at places that leftist thought created, as I recall there was the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba and, my current personal favorite, Venezuela.  Then there is Europe which seems to be sliding into poverty, if more slowly.  Not sure if they are a police state currently but if history is any guide they will get there eventually.

Marxism-Leninism is not the alpha and omega of Leftist thought, and none of the regimes you listed were truly socialist, by which I mean worker control of the means of production. You seem to be stuck in the ignorant belief that socialism = "big government", a belief created by decades of right-wing propaganda and by Social-Democratic parties trying to insist they were still socialist.