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Mises framed the socialist calculation debate at world, not national, scale

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tagsja-picks, define, xref, contrarian_or_surprising, trade, singleton, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@slobodian_globalists_2018, loc. 361

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Mises framed the socialist calculation debate at world, not national, scale

Evidence

It is not often noticed that Mises staged the famous socialist calculation debate of the interwar period not at the scale of the nation but at the scale of the world. He claimed that a hy­po­thet­i­cal “general director of the world economy” was redundant ­because “what would happen ­under ideal world socialism by order of the general director of the world economy is achieved in the ideal of the ­free world economy by the reign of competition.” In a market system, companies, capital, and workers migrated of their own accord to better-­yielding conditions. To fail to migrate would be to fail and, ultimately, to starve. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 361

Categorization

  • DEFINE: Clarifies that the socialist calculation debate’s stakes were global for Mises, a framing often missed in standard accounts.
  • XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader reading on neoliberalism and the market-vs-plan debate; reframes the calculation debate’s scale. — connects to: Mises launched the socialist calculation debate against Austro-Marxists and scientific Marxism — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 101; Mises’s price-based rebuttal of planning opened the Vienna planned-economy debate — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 58; Hayek and Mises favored global governance, not unfettered free markets — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 79

Broader Connections

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