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Market Socialism
Market socialism is a type of economic system involving social ownership of the means of production within the framework of a market economy. Various models for such a system exist, usually involving cooperative enterprises and sometimes a mix that includes public or private enterprises. In contrast to the majority of historic self-described socialist economies, which have substituted the market mechanism for some form of economic planning, market socialists wish to retain the use of supply and demand signals to guide the allocation of capital goods and the means of production. Under such a system, depending on whether socially owned firms are state-owned or operated as worker cooperatives, profits may variously be used to directly remunerate employees, accrue to society at large as the source of public finance, or be distributed amongst the population in a social dividend. Market socialism can be distinguished from the concept of the mixed economy because most models of m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Economic System
An economic system, or economic order, is a system of production, resource allocation and distribution of goods and services within an economy. It includes the combination of the various institutions, agencies, entities, decision-making processes, and patterns of consumption that comprise the economic structure of a given community. An economic system is a type of social system. The mode of production is a related concept. All economic systems must confront and solve the four fundamental economic problems: * What kinds and quantities of goods shall be produced: This fundamental economic problem is anchored on the theory of pricing. The theory of pricing, in this context, has to do with the economic decision-making between the production of capital goods and consumer goods in the economy in the face of scarce resources. In this regard, the critical evaluation of the needs of the society based on population distribution in terms of age, sex, occupation, and geography is very ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Public Finance
Public finance refers to the monetary resources available to governments and also to the study of finance within government and role of the government in the economy. Within academic settings, public finance is a widely studied subject in many branches of political science, political economy and public economics. Research assesses the government revenue and government expenditure of the public authorities and the adjustment of one or the other to achieve desirable effects and avoid undesirable ones. The purview of public finance is considered to be threefold, consisting of governmental effects on: # The efficient allocation of available resources; # The distribution of income among citizens; and # The stability of the economy. American public policy advisor and economist Jonathan Gruber put forth a framework to assess the broad field of public finance in 2010:Gruber, J. (2010) Public Finance and Public Policy (Third Edition), Worth Publishers, Pg. 3, Part 1 # When shoul ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Private Property
Private property is a legal designation for the ownership of property by non-governmental Capacity (law), legal entities. Private property is distinguishable from public property, which is owned by a state entity, and from Collective ownership, collective or cooperative property, which is owned by one or more non-governmental entities. Private property is foundational to capitalism, an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for Profit (economics), profit. As a legal concept, private property is defined and enforced by a country's political system. History The first evidence of private property may date back to the Babylonians in 1800 BC, as evidenced by the archeological discovery of Plimpton 322, a clay tablet used for calculating property boundaries; however, written discussions of private property were not seen until the Persian Empire, and emerged in the Western tradition at least as far back as Plato. Before the 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
To Each According To His Contribution
"To each according to his contribution" is a principle of distribution considered to be one of the defining features of socialism. It refers to an arrangement whereby individual compensation is representative of one's contribution to the social product (total output of the economy) in terms of effort, labor and productivity. This is in contrast to the method of distribution and compensation in capitalism, an economic and political system in which property owners can receive income by virtue of ownership irrespective of their contribution to the social product. The concept formed the basic definition of socialism for its pre-Marxist proponents, including Ricardian socialists, classical economists, collectivist anarchists and individualist anarchists, as well as for Marx, who contrasted it with " to each according to his need" as the corresponding principle of completed communism. Definition and purpose ''To each according to his contribution'' was a concept espoused by many ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free-market
In economics, a free market is an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority. Proponents of the free market as a normative ideal contrast it with a regulated market, in which a government intervenes in supply and demand by means of various methods such as taxes or regulations. In an idealized free market economy, prices for goods and services are set solely by the bids and offers of the participants. Scholars contrast the concept of a free market with the concept of a coordinated market in fields of study such as political economy, new institutional economics, economic sociology, and political science. All of these fields emphasize the importance in currently existing market systems of rule-making institutions external to the simple forces of supply and demand which create space for those ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Classical Economics
Classical economics, also known as the classical school of economics, or classical political economy, is a school of thought in political economy that flourished, primarily in Britain, in the late 18th and early-to-mid 19th century. It includes both the Smithian and Ricardian schools. Its main thinkers are held to be Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, and John Stuart Mill. These economists produced a theory of market economies as largely self-regulating systems, governed by natural laws of production and exchange (famously captured by Adam Smith's metaphor of the invisible hand). Adam Smith's '' The Wealth of Nations'' in 1776 is usually considered to mark the beginning of classical economics.Smith, Adam (1776) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations. (accessible by table of contents chapter titles) AdamSmith.org The fundamental message in Smith's book was that the wealth of any nation was determined not by the gol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mutualism (economic Theory)
Mutualism is an anarchist school of thought and economic theory that advocates for workers' control of the means of production, a free market made up of individual artisans, sole proprietorships and workers' cooperatives, and occupation and use property rights. As proponents of the labour theory of value and labour theory of property, mutualists oppose all forms of economic rent, profit and non-nominal interest, which they see as relying on the exploitation of labour. Mutualists seek to construct an economy without capital accumulation or concentration of land ownership. They also encourage the establishment of workers' self-management, which they propose could be supported through the issuance of mutual credit by mutual banks, with the aim of creating a federal society. Mutualism has its roots in the utopian socialism of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. It first developed a practical expression in Josiah Warren's community experiments in the United States, which he est ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ricardian Socialist
Ricardian socialism is a branch of classical economic thought based upon the work of the economist David Ricardo (1772–1823). Despite Ricardo being a capitalist economist, the term is used to describe economists in the 1820s and 1830s who developed a theory of capitalist exploitation from the theory developed by Ricardo that stated that labor is the source of all wealth and exchange value. This principle extends back to the principles of English philosopher John Locke. The Ricardian socialists reasoned that labor is entitled to all it produces, and that rent, profit and interest were not natural outgrowths of the free market process but were instead distortions. They argued that private ownership of the means of production should be supplanted by cooperatives owned by associations of workers. This designation is used in reference to economists in the early 19th century that elaborated a theory of capitalist exploitation from the classical economic proposition derived from A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pre-Marx Socialists
While Marxism had a significant impact on socialist thought, pre-Marxist thinkers (before Marx wrote on the subject) have advocated socialism in forms both similar and in stark contrast to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' conception of socialism, advocating some form of collective ownership over large-scale production, worker-management within the workplace, or in some cases a form of planned economy. List Early socialist and proto-socialist philosophers and political theorists: # Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus, ancient Roman statesmen who advocated heavily for policies in the interest of the Plebeians. These policies included land and wealth redistribution and subsidized grain to help the poor. # Gerrard Winstanley, who founded the Diggers movement in the United Kingdom # François-Noël Babeuf, French revolutionary and journalist # Charles Fourier, French philosopher who propounded principles very similar to that of Marx # Louis Blanqui, French socialist and writer # Marcus Thra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Socialist Calculation Debate
The socialist calculation debate, sometimes known as the economic calculation debate, was a discourse on the subject of how a socialist economy would perform economic calculation given the absence of the law of value, money, financial prices for capital goods and private ownership of the means of production. More specifically, the debate was centered on the application of economic planning for the allocation of the means of production as a substitute for capital markets and whether or not such an arrangement would be superior to capitalism in terms of efficiency and productivity. The historical debate was cast between the Austrian School represented by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, who argued against the feasibility of socialism; and between neoclassical and Marxian economists, most notably Cläre Tisch (as a forerunner), Oskar R. Lange, Abba P. Lerner, Fred M. Taylor, Henry Douglas Dickinson and Maurice Dobb, who took the position that socialism was both feasible ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Economic Stability
Economic stability is the absence of excessive fluctuations in the macroeconomy. An economy with fairly constant output growth and low and stable inflation would be considered economically stable. An economy with frequent large recessions, a pronounced business cycle, very high or variable inflation, or frequent financial crises would be considered economically unstable. Measures Real macroeconomic output can be decomposed into a trend and a cyclical part, where the variance of the cyclical series derived from the filtering technique (e.g., the band-pass filter, or the most commonly used Hodrick–Prescott filter) serves as the primary measure of departure from economic stability. A simple method of decomposition involves regressing real output on the variable "time", or on a polynomial in the time variable, and labeling the predicted levels of output as the trend and the residuals as the cyclical portion. Another approach is to model real output as difference stationary wit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Social Democracy
Social democracy is a Social philosophy, social, Economic ideology, economic, and political philosophy within socialism that supports Democracy, political and economic democracy and a gradualist, reformist, and democratic approach toward achieving social equality. In modern practice, social democracy has taken the form of predominantly capitalist economies, a robust welfare state, policies promoting social justice, market regulation, and a more Redistribution of income and wealth, equitable distribution of income. Social democracy maintains a commitment to Representative democracy, representative and participatory democracy. Common aims include curbing Social inequality, inequality, eliminating the oppression of Social privilege, underprivileged groups, eradicating poverty, and upholding universally accessible public services such as child care, Universal education, education, elderly care, Universal health care, health care, and workers' compensation. Economically, it support ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
