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Implicaba un sistema en beneficio de una pequeña clase de personas con un monopolio único de los activos de capital. Pero los capitalistas definidos de esta manera solo reciben una pequeña fracción del ingreso total received by labor; yet no one thinks of calling the economic system “laborism,” even though that is where three-quarters or more of the income goes. The more fundamental fallacy, however, is in narrowly conceiving capital to mean physical equipment rather than the human capital which may be vastly more valuable and far more widely dispersed, so that much of that vast majority of national income that is statistically counted as a return to “labor” is in fact a return to human capital that is widely owned.

Logically, Marxian economics did not need to assume that management or other non-labor inputs were of minor importance, even though historically this assumption was made and had serious practical consequences. It is the private ownership of capital that defines capitalism, and the capitalist investor rather than the manager who as deemed superfluous and a hindrance to production. Capital attempted to establish that capital owners had often acquired their wealth, historically, through force and fraud rather than through personal contributions to the economy’s production.[867] An enumeration of lurid examples does not of course establish general causation. But more fundamentally, even if all capital were assumed to have had unproductive retrospective implications this would still leave untouched the prospective policy issue as to whether private or public ownership would be more efficient for an economy and its people.

Whatever the past may have been, the policy question at any given juncture is what future results can be expected from current incentives and constraints, compared to other alternatives. The socialist tradition has long assumed that collectivized production “in the public interest” would in fact serve the masses of people ore effectively than private production motivated by a desire for private gain. But the Marxian part of the socialist tradition can less easily make this assumption, for Marxism emphasizes in many contexts that individual intention is not the crucial factor in causation.[868] Capital reminds us that the road to hell is paved with good intentions,[869] that everything that has been done wrong “has been done wrong for the very best of reasons,”[870] and Engels pointed out that “what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something no on willed.”[871] In short, Marxian analysis is based on systematic interactions, not individual intentions, so the fact that socialists may have nobler intentions than capitalists provide neither a logical nor an empirical reason to expect better results under socialism.

Reasoning systematically, Marx was one of the few socialists to understand that economic competition, motivated by “greed,” was what rove prices down under capitalism, as capitalists ceaselessly searched for more profits by seeking cheaper ways of producing than those possessed by their fellow capitalist rivals.[872] Mutual competition ensured that capitalists were in no position simply to tack higher profits onto production costs. Therefore, as production costs were driven down throughout an industry, prices tended to be driven down as well, to the benefit of the consuming public. But Marx never faced the issue whether socialist managers and central planners would be equally zealous in weeding out inefficiency and seeking new technologies—whose economic benefits they could not personally reap.

Marx understood that capitalists who introduced cost-saving innovations were motivated by the extra profits they could reap temporarily, until their rivals copied them, after which the production cost savings would accrue to the consumers, due to competition among the producers. But without even this temporary incentive of personal gain, would socialist planners be willing to put forth the same exertions and take on the same risks of disastrous failure that are inseparable from pioneering innovation? Historically, this has not been the case in the Soviet economy, where even the nation’s political leaders have publicly complained of the enterprise managers’ tendency to stick to “safe” established practices[873] and—in Brezhnev’s words—to shy away from innovation “as the devil shies away from incense.”[874]

Marx pointed out that the original innovations under capitalism were often ruined financially, and only later would other capitalists finally develop an innovation into a paying proposition.[875] While this may have been meant as a commentary on the individual injustice of rewards and contributions under capitalism, it also showed what desperate gambles innovators were prepared to take, in hopes of a large profit. A collectivized economy that stifles such profits in the interests of individual justice may create an even greater injustice to the consuming public by inhibiting economic innovation.