Um socialista honesto

David Boaz recorda Robert Heilbroner:

Robert Heilbroner, the bestselling writer of economics, died early this month at the age of 85. He and John Kenneth Galbraith may well have sold more economics books than all other economists combined. Alas, their talents lay more in the writing than the economics.

(...)

Few socialists outside the Communist Party are willing to acknowledge that real socialism means trading our "Millian liberties" for the purported good of economic planning and "a morally conscious collectivity."

He was not entirely impervious to new evidence, however. In 1989, he famously wrote in The New Yorker:

"Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won... Capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism."

In The New Yorker again the next year, he reminisced about hearing of Ludwig von Mises at Harvard in the 1930s. But of course his professors and fellow students scoffed at Mises's claim that socialism could not work. It seemed at the time, he wrote, that it was capitalism that was failing. Then, a mere 50 years later, he acknowledged: "It turns out, of course, that Mises was right" about the impossibility of socialism. I particularly like the "of course." Fifty years it took him to grasp the truth of what Mises wrote in 1920, and he blithely tossed off his newfound wisdom as "of course."