Any other book recommendations for a counter to Sowell's Basic Economics? It would be a good exercise to read his book and an alternative.
My question: an oft repeated refrain, when Marx is touted as a reasonable alternative, is that any time anyone tried his ideas out, it was a total disaster (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Chavez).
I have watched some Wolff on Youtube, as well as other lectures on Marxism, because I'm interested and relatively agnostic on the economic spectrum. But I never see this point (tens of millions dead due to internal issues, in these societies, in the 20th century) refuted with any scholarly heft - do you have any recommendations?
I think Steven Pinker is dead on about why Marx (and other interpretations of far left economic thought such as Chomsky's flavors of anarchism) are dead in the water - they fundamentally misunderstand human nature. I'm looking for someone who sounds as clear as Pinker, that can counter this take. Any suggestions?
Also, I don't know how anybody could say that kind of thing about Marx, specifically Das Kapital, which is what I'm most familiar with. It doesn't delve much into human nature, it's all about modes of production and exchange and labor value.
I've not read Marx, nor am I a Marxist, but my understanding is that most of his work is a diagnosis of a problem, not a plan for a cure. IIRC, Marx's own "plan" was basically more capitalism harder until it collapses and something ill-defined without its problems emerges from the ashes. Those people you cite (assuming they even wanted to improve anything rather than amass personal power), can probably be thought as a doctor who could correctly diagnose cancer but proposed a incorrect theory for a cure (e.g. something based on the four humors). Their failure to cure cancer doesn't mean the patient didn't have cancer or that cancer can't be cured.
Just to note, also, Chavez is the only person in that list who wasn't a Marxist-Leninist, and it's not helpful to understanding to include him in that list.
But we have no model for what a healthy, capitalism-free society would look like. Every attempt at removing capitalism from the system has led to totalitarian results.
This doesn't prove that capitalism is the best possible system, but it strongly suggests that alternatives are worse.
That's not quite accurate, since capitalism hasn't always existed and markets haven't haven't always been the primary means of exchange. There's also a fairly broad range of capitalist systems with different trade offs. We also don't know if capitalism won't also ultimately lead to totalitarian results.
In these discussions, we also probably need to make a distinction between capitalism and markets. You could perhaps have a society that keeps markets more-or-less as they are but "removes capitalism" by implementing a different relationship between labor and ownership, for instance.
> This doesn't prove that capitalism is the best possible system, but it strongly suggests that alternatives are worse.
I dispute the latter point. It's kinda like saying the failure of the iAPX 432 and Itanium strongly suggests there's no better alternative to the x86 architecture. In this case, I don't think we have much understanding about what's unknown.
Taleb leans libertarian on large scales himself.
A couple things. Chavez is of a different category from the other three just on the amount of death under the other regimes. The question of the results of socialism and capitalism is complex. It's worth reading both historical and economically focused works to get a more nuanced view than the one that you've laid out. For a few suggestions:
On historical critiques of the US-centric perspective:
The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins
The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad
A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn
Economic works:
Competing Economic Theories, Richard Wolff
Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, David Harvey
There are more authors (Kliman, Moseley, Shaikh, etc.), but these two would be a good start.
These are works with particular perspectives and should be read as such. If you want competing ideological works, read a standard history book and Hayek, Mises, Friedman, etc.
It is worth noting that both Marx and Engels were in favour of democracy, even going as far as saying that the actual means of production should be democratized. Both would probably be appalled by what became of their theories under Stalin and Mao...
Also, as Marx got older he got less and less political active, there is even a letter where he refused to be seen as a leading figure of the communist movement. Das Kapital is from this later period of his life, and subsequently very scant on noneconomic politics...
I am a software engineer. I have a rate of pay that I consider to be more valuable than my labor, for which I will gladly exchange my labor and feel as though I have profited from the transaction. Prospective employers have an amount of labor output that they value more than a rate of pay, for which they will gladly exchange in an attempt to profit from the transaction. We engage in a mutual arrangement, wherein we both walk away having benefitted from the transaction. The fact that the employer has the capacity to profit from my output is not theft. In fact, I would feel absolutely horrible if my employer didn't profit from me at all, because I ALWAYS profit from them.
I can assure you that the Harvard and Yale educated professor that's written textbooks on the subject knows how markets work. He might be heterodox in his adherence to marxist economics, but he fully understands the orthodox position, almost certainly in more detail than you or I ever will.
Similarly, saying that Kurt Wise doesn't understand geology and paleontology when he has a PhD in the field and has contributed good science is pretty absurd.
Dismissing their claims lie in other arguments.